Share this story Roll it out onto the sun-bleached hardpan at Muroc in 1943 and the Northrop XP-56 looked less like a fighter than a dark, headless projectile. There was almost no tail, no nose propeller, and a fat belly fin slicing the desert air. Jack Northrop...
Share this story When the Supermarine Scimitar first crashed onto a carrier deck in 1958, it arrived as the biggest, heaviest and most powerful aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had ever tried to operate from a ship. Twin Rolls-Royce Avons gave it such brutal thrust that a...
Share this story On 3 July 1955, forty-eight identical swept-wing jets thundered over Tushino airfield outside Moscow in a single roaring formation. Western observers at the airshow did the arithmetic and felt a chill: the Soviet Union had just fielded its first...
Share this story On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it...
Share this story In the autumn of 1942, the strangest fighter in America sat on a dry lakebed in the Mojave wearing a lie. Whenever the aircraft was parked in the open, ground crews bolted a dummy wooden propeller to its nose, because the machine hidden beneath the...
Share this story Most modern combat aircraft are built to avoid getting hit. The Su-25 Frogfoot was built to get hit and keep flying. Squat, blunt-nosed and wrapped in armour, the Sukhoi Su-25 — called Grach (“Rook”) by its crews and...
Share this story Ask anyone who served in Vietnam what the war sounded like, and many will give you the same answer: a rhythmic, chopping whop-whop-whop rolling in over the trees. It was the sound of the Bell UH-1 — the Huey — and depending on which end of...
Share this story It is past midnight over Saipan, the summer of 1944, and a Japanese bomber crew thinks the darkness is keeping them safe. It isn’t. Somewhere below and behind them, a big twin-boomed aircraft is sliding into position, its radar operator...
Share this story Picture a shipping container bolted to the deck of a warship, its interior glowing with the soft light of industrial 3D printers. Outside, the sea is heaving — twelve-foot waves, some of the roughest water off California in five years. Inside,...
Share this story Just after dawn on Monday, air-raid sirens and the buzz of engines reached a city most of the war had never touched. Nizhnekamsk sits roughly 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the nearest Ukrainian-held ground, deep in the Russian republic of...
Share this story When people picture wartime aircraft, they picture fighters and bombers. Almost no one pictures a helicopter — yet by 1942 Germany was flying a nimble little rotorcraft off the decks of warships, spotting submarines in the Baltic. It was the...
Share this story On the Fourth of July 1989, two American F-15 pilots on alert in the Netherlands were scrambled to intercept an intruder crossing into NATO airspace. What they found was a real Soviet fighter, deep over Western Europe — with no one flying it.It...
Recent Comments