The Man Who Flew 487 Different Aircraft
Share this story At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a Scottish teenager was taken flying by a First World War fighter ace. As they landed, the German told the boy two things: learn to fly, and learn German. The boy did both — and grew up to fly more different aircraft...
The British Jet That Flew Faster Than the Sun
Share this story On 10 March 1956, a slender British delta streaked down a measured course over the English south coast and did something no aircraft had ever done: it flew faster than 1,000 miles per hour in level flight. When the timekeepers finished their sums, the...
Hitler’s Flying Wing and the Stealth Myth
Share this story In the film Captain America, the villain escapes aboard a sleek, tailless flying wing. It looks like science fiction. It is not entirely invented: the design is lifted almost directly from a real German aircraft that flew in the last winter of the...
Curtiss Built a Fighter That Flew Tail-First
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its...
Sweden’s Mach 2 Dragon That Flew From Roads
Share this story In the early 1950s, a neutral country of seven million people set out to build a supersonic interceptor that could hide in the forest, launch from a public road, and climb fast enough to catch a Soviet nuclear bomber over the Baltic. The result looked...
America’s Air War to Keep Hormuz Open
Share this story A commercial oil tanker was steaming through international waters toward Iran when a U.S. aircraft put Hellfire missiles into its smokestack. The ship stopped. It was, in the plainest terms, a blockade being enforced with air power — and it is...
Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
Share this story The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
Share this story For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force...
Gliders, a Dictator, and an Impossible Takeoff
Share this story On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave Desert this month, an aircraft with no pilot, no ejection seat and no name stenciled under a canopy did something no American drone had ever done. It fired an air-to-air missile at a target. The jet was Anduril’s YFQ-44A...
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