Share this story It is one of the Second World War’s most durable legends: that in January 1944 a giant six-engined German bomber took off from occupied France, crossed the Atlantic, flew to within sight of Manhattan, photographed the skyline, and slipped home...
Share this story By 1944, Germany’s bomber fleets were spent, and the V-1 flying bomb — the “buzz bomb” — was terrorising London with one glaring flaw: it could miss a target the size of Greater London entirely. Someone proposed a brutally simple fix...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps put out a request for something deliberately radical — a fighter that broke the rules of how a fighter should be built. Vultee’s answer was the XP-54: a twin-boom machine with an inverted gull wing, the engine and...
Share this story In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio...
Share this story He was 31 years old — ancient by fighter-pilot standards — which is how a hard-drinking, twice-divorced Marine named Gregory Boyington got the nickname “Pappy.” He was also, by 1943, something close to washed up: a former Flying Tiger with...
Share this story He was born in Brazil, to a father from Alsace and a mother from Lorraine, and learned to fly at a club in Rio. He would end the war a wing commander in the Royal Air Force at the age of twenty-four, and General de Gaulle would call him...
Share this story It was a little before nine on the night of 18 April 1995, and Captain Brian Udell was flying his F-15E Strike Eagle out over the black Atlantic off North Carolina. Beside him sat his weapons systems officer, Captain Dennis White. It was routine...
Share this story At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later,...
Share this story A modest airbase in southeastern Bulgaria has become the newest point of friction between Tehran and the West — and the cause is not a bomber or a stealth fighter, but a fleet of ageing flying petrol stations.In late July 2026, Bulgaria’s...
Share this story A month ago, the U.S. Air Force cleared its first two “fighter drones” for production. This week, the factories actually started building them — and one of them dropped a letter from its name.On 27 July 2026, the first Ohio-built Fury...
Share this story On 29 July 2026, the Ukrainian Air Force reported the loss of an F-16 during a combat mission to intercept Russian air targets. The pilot ejected and survived.According to the Air Force, controllers lost contact with the aircraft while it was engaged...
Share this story At about 2:30 in the afternoon on 30 July 2026, sensors along South Korea’s border with the North picked up something they couldn’t identify: an unmanned aircraft, near a frontline outpost, not squawking anything friendly. In the most...
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