Share this story By 1944, Germany’s bomber fleets were spent, and the V-1 flying bomb — the “buzz bomb” — was terrorising London with one glaring flaw: it could miss a target the size of Greater London entirely. Someone proposed a brutally simple fix...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps put out a request for something deliberately radical — a fighter that broke the rules of how a fighter should be built. Vultee’s answer was the XP-54: a twin-boom machine with an inverted gull wing, the engine and...
Share this story In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio...
Share this story A little over a year before he became the first human being to set foot on another world, Neil Armstrong very nearly died a mile from his own desk — in one of the strangest, ugliest flying machines NASA ever built. On 6 May 1968, he ejected from the...
Share this story He was 31 years old — ancient by fighter-pilot standards — which is how a hard-drinking, twice-divorced Marine named Gregory Boyington got the nickname “Pappy.” He was also, by 1943, something close to washed up: a former Flying Tiger with...
Share this story He was born in Brazil, to a father from Alsace and a mother from Lorraine, and learned to fly at a club in Rio. He would end the war a wing commander in the Royal Air Force at the age of twenty-four, and General de Gaulle would call him...
Share this story It was a little before nine on the night of 18 April 1995, and Captain Brian Udell was flying his F-15E Strike Eagle out over the black Atlantic off North Carolina. Beside him sat his weapons systems officer, Captain Dennis White. It was routine...
Share this story At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later,...
Share this story Some warplanes make their name in dogfights, twisting through the sky with guns blazing. The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo made most of its name doing the opposite: flying low, flying flat out, and flying completely unarmed straight over the people trying to...
Share this story Some aircraft impress by their cleverness. The Tupolev Tu-160 impresses first by its sheer dimensions. At 54.1 metres (177 ft 6 in) it is longer than a Boeing B-52, and when its wings are spread it measures 55.7 metres (182 ft 9 in) from tip to tip....
Share this story Every so often aviation history throws up an aircraft whose greatest achievement was simply existing. The Bell P-59 Airacomet is the patron saint of that club. It was America’s first jet aircraft, a genuine milestone, and yet it was so...
Share this story Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to...
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