Share this story On the afternoon of Friday, 26 October 2001, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, stepped up to a podium in Washington. Three thousand kilometres away, Boeing chairman Phil Condit and his Joint Strike Fighter boss, Frank Statkus,...
Share this story It was a Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, 29 February 2008 — a leap day, fittingly, for a decision almost nobody saw coming. Air Force officials stepped before the press to name the winner of the KC-X tanker programme, 179 aircraft and roughly 35...
Share this story The desert air was still cool at Edwards Air Force Base on the morning of 27 August 1990 when Northrop chief test pilot Paul Metz taxied out in a machine that looked like nothing else on Earth. Charcoal grey, diamond-winged, its two tails canted...
Share this story On the morning of 25 January 1995, on the island of Andøya in Arctic Norway, a team of Norwegian and American scientists watched a four-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket climb away from its launcher and curve north-east over the sea towards...
Share this story Fifteen minutes past midnight, 26 September 1983. In a command bunker called Serpukhov-15, south-west of Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is settled into the commander’s chair for a night shift he was not originally scheduled to work. In...
Share this story By the late afternoon of Saturday, 27 October 1962, the men of Soviet submarine B-59 had very little left to breathe. The boat had been at sea for almost four weeks, hiding from the US Navy in the warm water north of Cuba, and her batteries were...
To start with: What is the Sound Barrier? The “sound barrier” refers to the point at which an object travels at the speed of sound, also known as Mach 1. Sound travels as pressure waves through a medium like air, and its speed depends on factors like temperature and...
The F-104 Starfighter, known as the “missile with a man in it,” is already one of the most iconic aircraft ever built. With its supersonic speed, razor-thin wings, and futuristic profile, the F-104 seemed like something plucked straight out of science...
The Luckiest Man Alive Imagine this: it’s 1918, the skies over Europe are a chaotic ballet of whirling biplanes, and our star, Captain John H. Hedley, is perched in the back of a Bristol F.2B, a two-seater fighter, with his pilot, Captain Reginald...
The Flight of HOBO 28: A Cozy Catastrophe Imagine, if you will, a B-52G Stratofortress, a titan of the skies, soaring over the frigid expanse of Greenland. It’s 1968, and this isn’t just any flight; HOBO 28 carries four Mark 28 F1 hydrogen bombs, each a...
Margaret Horton was a Leading Aircraftwoman in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during World War II. She was stationed at RAF Hibaldstow, a satellite of Kirton Lindsey in Lincolnshire. Horton worked as a flight mechanic, and her duties included sitting on...
All of them from the tiny French speaking part of Switzerland! Yves Rossy [ted id=1271] Claude Nicollier Bertrand Piccard (Balloon – Solar Impulse) [ted id=723] Vibrant Aviation industry: Swiss Space Systems Share this story Related QuestionsWho are...
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