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...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada desert on a July morning in 1957, five American officers stood in the open, looked straight up, and waited for a nuclear weapon to go off directly above their heads. There was no bunker. There was no lead shielding. There was...
Share this story Somewhere under the granite of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, a squadron of fighter jets rolled into a cave and the blast doors closed behind them. This was not a movie set. It was this week’s headline act of Han Kuang 42, the...
Share this story Three de Havilland DH.108 Swallows were ever built. Each one, in turn, killed the man flying it. That is not a curse or a legend — it is simply the record of one of the most beautiful and lethal experimental aircraft Britain ever put into the...
Share this story Imagine strapping into a fighter, climbing to altitude, and then flying straight at a bomber whose gunners have been ordered to open fire on you. Not blanks. Not a camera. Real bullets, aimed at your aircraft, on purpose. Now imagine doing it two or...
Share this story Airlines love a big number. Turkish Airlines just posted one that is hard to argue with: on Sunday, 2 August 2026, the group flew 352,715 passengers in a single day — the busiest day in its 93-year history. That figure is not one airline but two...
Share this story It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no...
Share this story On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank...
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