Share this story On a grey Welsh morning in early May, hikers lining the ridges above Cadair Idris heard the unmistakable rumble of twin Pratt & Whitney F100 engines reverberating off granite walls. Then it appeared: an F-15E Strike Eagle wearing a paint scheme...
Share this story On paper, the C-5 Galaxy is the most capable military transport aircraft ever built by the Western world. In practice, on any given day in 2025, 63 percent of the fleet is broken. That number — 37 percent mission capable — is not a rounding error or a...
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
Share this story It is 0200 hours in the Eastern Mediterranean. The flight deck of USS Gerald R. Ford smells faintly of jet fuel and seawater. A yellow-shirted Air Boss raises an arm. Three hundred feet of catapult — not steam, not for the first time in U.S. naval...
Share this story By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a...
Share this story In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It could sustain Mach 2 — a speed contemporary fighters could reach only in short dashes. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable...
Share this story It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let...
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
Share this story There is a shipping container somewhere in the world right now that does not look like much. Steel box. Corner castings. Maybe a dent or two from a rough crossing. You have seen a million of them stacked at ports, rolling down highways on flatbeds,...
Share this story There is a sound that no aviation fan forgets. A rising howl of twin Pratt & Whitney TF30s at full afterburner, the variable-geometry wings sweeping back as the jet accelerates from a carrier deck at a rate that seems almost physically offensive —...
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
Share this story The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit held only rudimentary instruments — an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator — and the controls to fire three solid-fuel rocket motors....
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