Share this story It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that “best” is four or five different questions...
Share this story Inside the glider, in the dark, the tank crew sat in their tank with the engine running. The exhaust was ducted out through the side of the aircraft. When the glider stopped moving, the driver pulled a lanyard to release the shackles and drove...
Share this story Every flying boat is a compromise between two incompatible shapes. To get off the water you want a deep hull, to keep the propellers clear of spray, and a wing sitting at a high angle so it will unstick. To fly efficiently you want neither of those...
Share this story Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they...
Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story Look at a Blohm & Voss BV 141 head-on and your brain files a complaint. The engine and the tail are on the left. The crew sit in a glass pod on the right. There is no fuselage in the middle, because there is no middle. It looks like two different...
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Share this story On 2 June 1944, B-17s of the Fifteenth Air Force bombed marshalling yards in Hungary and then kept going east. They landed in Ukraine, at three Soviet airfields the Red Army had handed over to the Americans. It was the first time in the war that a...
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
Share this story Iraq already flies the Bell 407. On 31 August 2026 the U.S. State Department cleared it to buy a great many more of them, along with a bigger stablemate and enough guns, rockets and sensors to turn utility helicopters into armed scouts. The approval,...
Share this story Egypt was the first country outside France to buy the Rafale. Eleven years later, it may be about to become the type’s biggest foreign customer by a wide margin. On 2 September 2026 the French daily La Tribune reported that Cairo has submitted a...
Share this story The treeline is close enough to count individual trees. The horizon sits high in the windscreen, the ground blurring past in green streaks, and somewhere ahead a small jet-powered cruise missile is running for a Ukrainian city at roughly the speed of...
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