Share this story Every swing-wing jet that followed — the F-14 Tomcat, the F-111, the Tornado, the B-1 — owes a debt to one small, awkward and rather dangerous research aircraft from the early 1950s. The Bell X-5 was the first aeroplane in the world that...
Share this story Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for...
Share this story On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.”...
Share this story In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind...
Share this story A Czech startup that has spent the better part of a decade quietly flying odd-looking prototypes just showed its hand. On 27 August 2026, Prague-based Zuri unveiled its first commercial product: an uncrewed cargo tiltrotor built to lift a couple of...
Share this story It was nearly 27 metres of gleaming Soviet ambition — a needle-nosed, missile-armed interceptor built to swat American bombers out of the stratosphere. On 16 July 1956 the Lavochkin La-250 lifted off for the first time, rolled uncontrollably,...
Share this story It looked like nothing else in the sky: a stubby twin-engine fighter whose nose stopped dead at the wing, as if someone had sawn the front off a normal aeroplane. Test pilots loved it. Comic-book readers worshipped it. And the U.S. Navy, after flying...
Share this story On 26 August 2026, seven Sikorsky S-70i Black Hawks were blessed and formally handed over at Villamor Air Base in Pasay City. With that quiet ceremony, the Philippine Air Force closed out one of the most consequential procurement runs in its history...
Share this story At NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 — the engine that normally hangs on the back of a Bombardier Global business jet — was run on 100 percent hydrogen through a complete simulated flight cycle. Start-up,...
Share this story On 30 May 1949, about 5,000 feet over Warwickshire, John Oliver Lancaster put an Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 into a shallow dive and the aircraft began to shake. Not a buffet — a violent asymmetric flutter of the elevons and wingtip fins, roughly one...
Share this story On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any...
Share this story At five in the morning on Thursday, a door shaped like the front of a Boston townhouse swung open beside Gate C25 at Logan. Behind it: 12,000 square feet of wood panelling, copper trim, a replica of Fenway’s Green Monster and a hidden candy...
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