Share this story Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle...
Share this story On 20 June 1951, over the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler did something no pilot had ever done. As his stubby little research jet, the Bell X-5, climbed away from the desert floor, he reached for a...
Share this story On the morning of 28 June 1939, twenty-two extraordinarily lucky people walked down a pier at Port Washington on Long Island and climbed aboard what looked like an ocean liner with wings. Captain R.O.D. Sullivan ran up the four big engines, and the...
Share this story It is the middle of the night somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, and a four-engine turboprop is flying low and slow above the black water. Inside, a Navy flight officer hunches over a screen, watching a pattern of floating microphones he has just...
Share this story It is just before dawn on 17 April 1944, and a sleek, triple-tailed airliner is rolling down the runway at Lockheed’s Burbank field. In the left seat, hands on the controls, sits one of the most famous men in America: Howard Hughes —...
Share this story It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the...
Share this story It looks like someone strapped wings and two open cockpits onto a beer keg and pushed it off a hill. Short, fat and hollow, the Stipa-Caproni is routinely voted one of the ugliest aircraft ever to actually fly. And yet this 1932 Italian oddity quietly...
Share this story Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes...
Share this story It was a bright, ordinary afternoon in Florida. At about two o’clock on 5 December 1945, five Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers rumbled off the runway at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation exercise. Fourteen men, a clear sky, a...
Share this story At 75,000 feet over the Baltic Sea, the world is dark blue above and curved below, and the only sound in the cockpit is the hiss of the pressure suit. On the morning of 29 June 1987, that calm ended with a bang.The right engine of Lt. Col. Duane...
Share this story It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking...
Share this story On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing...
Recent Comments