Share this story When Iranian missiles struck an air base in eastern Jordan last Friday and killed American servicemen, the base was identified in every report by its name: Muwaffaq Salti. Almost nobody outside Jordan knows who that was. He was a first lieutenant in...
Share this story Militarily, Suez worked. In six days, Anglo-French air power destroyed the Egyptian Air Force largely on the ground, paratroops took an airfield, Royal Marines made the first helicopter assault in the history of warfare, and the invasion force held...
Share this story Everything a combat pilot knows about dropping a bomb assumes air. Thick air, at sensible altitudes, where wings generate predictable lift, engines produce rated thrust, and a weapon released at a known speed follows a known arc to the ground. In May...
Share this story At 2005 on 17 May 1987, the guided missile frigate USS Stark was told that an Iraqi aircraft had left the mainland and was heading south down the Persian Gulf. This was not alarming. Iraqi aircraft did this most nights, hunting tankers carrying...
Share this story The A Shau valley, 10 March 1966. A Special Forces camp is being overrun by two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. The hills either side rise fifteen hundred feet and the cloud base is at eight hundred, which means any aircraft coming to help has to...
Share this story Everyone knows who first broke the sound barrier: Chuck Yeager, October 1947, the orange Bell X-1, a rib strapped up with a broom handle. It is one of the great stories in aviation. But there is a second name that belongs beside it — a quiet engineer...
Share this story Ask anyone which airliner first broke the sound barrier and they will say Concorde. They will be wrong by seven years — and by one very ordinary-looking Douglas jetliner that most people have completely forgotten. On 21 August 1961, a standard Douglas...
Share this story In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load...
Share this story In the late 1950s the US Army went looking for a machine that no one had ever quite built: something between a jeep and a helicopter. A flying jeep — a simple platform a soldier could stand on, lift straight up, and buzz over a battlefield. It sounds...
Share this story On paper, the Rockwell XFV-12 was a dream: a supersonic, Mach-2 fighter that could rise straight up off a small ship’s deck, fight like an F-4 Phantom, and land vertically in a space no runway could offer. The US Navy wanted it badly. Rockwell...
Share this story For a single year, Italy believed it had built the first jet aeroplane in history. On 27 August 1940, a sleek, barrel-shaped machine howled into the sky over Milan with no propeller anywhere to be seen — and the world’s aviation authority duly...
Share this story In 1942, someone at General Motors had a tidy idea: instead of designing a new fighter from scratch, why not bolt one together from parts of aircraft that already existed? Take a Mustang’s wings, a dive-bomber’s tail, a Corsair’s landing gear, wrap...
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