Share this story At 11:24 on the morning of 14 August 2005, a Greek Air Force F-16 pilot pulled alongside a Boeing 737 orbiting quietly over the Aegean and looked into the cockpit. The first officer was slumped motionless in his seat. The captain’s seat was...
Share this story Twelve minutes after leaving Tokyo on the evening of 12 August 1985, the rear pressure bulkhead of a Boeing 747 gave way. The escaping air blew off most of the vertical stabiliser and severed all four hydraulic systems. The crew were left with an...
Share this story Two minutes and thirty-three seconds passed between the moment an Airbus A310 stopped doing what its crew believed it was doing, and the moment it hit a hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau. Seventy-five people died. The story is usually told as a simple...
Share this story The raid was supposed to take thirty minutes. Sixteen helicopters, a four-minute flight, two Somali commanders lifted out of a building near the Olympic Hotel, and home. What happened instead ran for seventeen hours and cost eighteen American lives,...
Share this story At two minutes past noon on 21 February 1973, the co-pilot of a Libyan Boeing 727 told air traffic control in Cairo that he was ten miles out and ready to descend. He was a hundred and five miles away, in the wrong country, with two Israeli Phantoms...
Share this story At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was...
Share this story At 3:46 in the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1935, a four-engined flying boat lifted off the water at Alameda, California, and set course west across an ocean that no aeroplane had ever crossed on a schedule. Around twenty thousand people were...
Share this story On the night of 21 September 1993, a decorated Soviet combat pilot climbed onto the podium of the Russian parliament and, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, swore himself in as President of Russia. Five years earlier, the same man had been hanging...
Share this story On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in...
Share this story Argentina bought five fighter jets from France, paid for them, and took delivery in May 2019. Seven years later, not one of them has flown a single operational sortie. On 20 August the Argentine Navy stopped pretending they ever would. The aircraft...
Share this story Four twin-engined transports fly line abreast, eighty metres apart, a hundred and fifty feet above the canopy. Behind each one a white plume spreads and settles into the trees. The run takes about four and a half minutes and covers sixteen kilometres....
Share this story The 413th Flight Test Squadron does not fly rescue missions. It is a test unit. It puts helicopters through developmental trials and writes up the results. But when the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center calls, it is usually because everything else...
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