Share this story Some aircraft whisper. The Avro Shackleton announced itself from three valleys away. Long before you could see it, you felt it: a deep, chest-rattling drone that rolled across the North Atlantic like distant artillery, the unmistakable sound of four...
Share this story Every so often an aeroplane arrives that is so obviously ahead of its moment that it embarrasses everything parked next to it. In October 1934, on a new airfield at Mildenhall in Suffolk, three of them lined up on the same morning. They were de...
Share this story Picture a field in occupied France. It is a little after midnight, and there is a full moon riding above the poplars. Three people stand in the wet grass, holding bicycle lamps, hearts going like drums. They are listening. And then they hear it: a...
Share this story On the morning of 15 July 1942, eight American warplanes went hunting for a break in the weather over the North Atlantic and found the roof of the world instead. They had left Greenland at first light, bound for Iceland and then the war in Europe, but...
Share this story Few aircraft state their purpose as plainly as the Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant. It was a barn with wings: a slab-sided freighter with a wingspan of 55.2 metres (181 ft 1 in), a nose that split open into clamshell doors, and a cargo hold eleven metres...
Share this story Picture the scene over the grey Atlantic in 1943. A Luftwaffe fighter pilot spots a fat, slow British flying boat lumbering along at wave-top height, an unmissable target the size of a small ferry. Easy kill, surely. And yet, again and again, German...
Share this story For the first year of the Pacific war, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero had a kind of spell over Allied pilots. It turned tighter, climbed better and reached farther than anything the US Navy could put up against it, and the men flying the stubby F4F Wildcat...
Share this story In 1911, flying across the United States was widely considered impossible. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst put money on it anyway, offering $50,000 to the first pilot to cross the country by air in 30 days or less. The men best equipped...
Share this story In May 1930 a 26-year-old typist’s daughter from Hull climbed into a second-hand biplane she had named Jason, pointed it toward the far side of the planet, and set out to fly alone to Australia. Amy Johnson had held a pilot’s licence for...
Share this story In the spring of 1928 the Pacific Ocean was still, in aviation terms, a blank. No one had ever flown an aircraft across it. The distances were monstrous, the weather unknowable, and the navigation — over thousands of miles of empty water with no...
Share this story On the evening of 4 October 1930, the largest flying object the world had ever built slipped its mooring mast at Cardington and turned south for India. The R101 was 777 feet long, more than seven storeys tall, and carried a government minister who had...
Share this story In the summer of 1927, a Hawaiian pineapple magnate offered a fortune to the first aviators who could fly from California to Honolulu — 2,400 miles across the open Pacific. Fifteen crews signed up, tens of thousands of spectators came to watch,...
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