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 They had gone to a ballgame. A father and his adult son, both private pilots, flew into St. Louis to watch baseball, then climbed back into their Beechcraft Baron for the two-hour hop home to Arkansas. It was late, it was dark, and thunderstorms were...
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 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...
Stellen Sie sich einen Schiffscontainer vor, der auf dem Deck eines Kriegsschiffs festgeschraubt ist und dessen Inneres im sanften Licht industrieller 3D-Drucker erstrahlt. Draußen tobt das Meer – vier Meter hohe Wellen, die rauesten Seebedingungen vor Kalifornien seit fünf Jahren. Drinnen ….
Share this story On a brilliantly clear March morning in 1966, a BOAC Boeing 707 lifted off from Tokyo bound for Hong Kong, and its crew did something generous and entirely human: they turned toward Mount Fuji so their passengers could photograph Japan’s perfect...
Share this story On a clear night in April 1979, a Boeing 727 cruising at 39,000 feet over Michigan suddenly rolled onto its back and fell out of the sky, spinning through two complete rolls as it plunged toward the ground. Sixty-three seconds later it had dropped...
Share this story A Boeing 747 does not simply fall out of the sky. But on the night of 19 February 1985, over the Pacific, one did — rolling onto its side and plunging nearly six miles toward the ocean with 274 people aboard. That any of them lived is down to a...
Share this story Cut a hole in the side of a jumbo jet, point a two-and-a-half-metre telescope out of it, and fly the whole contraption into the stratosphere at night. It sounds like a terrible idea. For twelve years, it was one of the most productive telescopes in...
Share this story Imagine a cargo plane that works like a truck and trailer. It lands, drops off a fully loaded box, clips on an empty one, and is airborne again in minutes — while ground crews unload the box it left behind. In 1950, Fairchild actually built that...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked American industry a genuinely strange question: could a fighter take off straight up, standing on its tail, from a platform on the back of a warship? Lockheed’s answer was a stubby little aircraft that...
Share this story Picture the problem. A spy is stranded on an ice floe near the top of the world, far beyond the reach of any helicopter, on ground where no aircraft can land. How do you get him home without stopping?The Cold War answer was gloriously insane: you fly...
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