Share this story In early November 1956, on the deck of HMS Eagle in the eastern Mediterranean, a deck officer raised his flag and a grey jet with rockets under its wings shot off the catapult towards Egypt. It was a Hawker Sea Hawk, and for the next few days it and...
Share this story On 10 June 2013, after three weeks of wind, swell and false starts, a salvage barge off the Kent coast slowly lifted a battered, barnacle-crusted aircraft out of the English Channel. It had lain upside down on the Goodwin Sands since 26 August 1940....
Share this story Every aircraft on the American civil register carries a short code that is entirely its own, from a four-digit number on a club Cessna to N905NA on one of NASA’s old Shuttle Carrier 747s. It is painted on the fuselage, spoken over the radio and...
Share this story Picture a high-pressure turbine disc coming out of a CFM56 in an engine shop. It has passed every inspection it has ever had. It shows no crack, no corrosion, no damage of any kind. By every test anyone can run on it, it is a perfectly good part. It...
Share this story On 18 December 1939, 22 Vickers Wellington bombers flew in broad daylight towards the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven. RAF Bomber Command believed a tight formation of well-armed bombers could defend itself. Over the Heligoland Bight, German...
Share this story The hangar doors slide open, a grey flying wing is towed into the light, and for the first time the camera lingers where it matters: underneath. On Monday 9 November 2026, Chinese state television aired new close-up footage of the GJ-11 stealth drone,...
Share this story Late on the afternoon of 9 May 1943, two Spitfires of No. 165 Squadron caught an unidentified twin-engined aircraft orbiting low off the Aberdeenshire coast. As the lead pilot closed in, the stranger lowered its undercarriage, fired red flares and...
Share this story Stand at the fence at any big airport and watch a Boeing 787 taxi past. The back edge of each engine nacelle is cut into a row of neat triangular teeth, like the rim of a saw blade someone has rolled into a cylinder. Passengers assume it is styling....
Share this story In 1945 Japan’s aircraft industry was not just defeated, it was switched off. The post-war restrictions banned Japanese firms from aircraft research and from making aircraft materials and equipment. The country that had built the Zero spent the...
Share this story On Friday 14 March 2025, two elderly jet transports flew their last sortie for the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. The fitting detail was which two they were: serials 28-1001 and 28-1002, the very first Kawasaki C-1s ever built, the prototypes that had...
Share this story On 18 June 2024, at the Swedish Air Force Museum in Linköping, the Flygvapnet held a retirement ceremony for a jet that had first flown 61 years earlier. Generations of Swedish fighter pilots, from the Viggen era to the Gripen, had taken their...
Share this story On the evening of 20 November 1962, John F. Kennedy walked into a press conference with news the world had been waiting almost four weeks to hear. The Soviet missiles were already gone from Cuba. What had kept the US Navy’s blockade in place...
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