Share this story The message came from Air Operations Command in Jakarta, and for the ninety-five men and women of Skadron Udara 15 it meant something none of them had done before: pack up five jets, cross the Arafura Sea, and go fly with the world.For the first time,...
Share this story At 02:19 on 21 November 1970, an American helicopter deliberately flew itself into the trees inside a North Vietnamese prison camp twenty-three miles from Hanoi. Its rotor blades chewed through forty-foot foliage and it came down hard in a courtyard...
Share this story On the evening of 14 October 1973, a C-5A Galaxy touched down at Lod airport outside Tel Aviv carrying 97 tons of 105 mm howitzer shells. Roughly a hundred miles to the south-west, the largest tank battle since Kursk was being fought, and the Israeli...
Share this story The drone had already been shot down. That is the detail that makes this loss different from the others. On Saturday, in northern Iraq, a US service member was killed during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance recovered from a downed...
Share this story In December 2011, an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767 landed at London Gatwick and did not leave. It was impounded over unpaid debts, and with it went the last direct air link between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom — a route the airline had flown since April...
Share this story When Iranian missiles struck an air base in eastern Jordan last Friday and killed American servicemen, the base was identified in every report by its name: Muwaffaq Salti. Almost nobody outside Jordan knows who that was. He was a first lieutenant in...
Share this story The A Shau valley, 10 March 1966. A Special Forces camp is being overrun by two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. The hills either side rise fifteen hundred feet and the cloud base is at eight hundred, which means any aircraft coming to help has to...
Share this story The air base is named after a man who died in an aeroplane. Lieutenant Muwaffaq Salti was a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, killed in combat with Israeli fighters on 13 November 1966 during the Battle of Samu. Jordan gave his name to the base at...
Share this story Everyone knows who first broke the sound barrier: Chuck Yeager, October 1947, the orange Bell X-1, a rib strapped up with a broom handle. It is one of the great stories in aviation. But there is a second name that belongs beside it — a quiet engineer...
Share this story Before there was radar, before there were reliable instruments, before anyone had crossed the United States without landing, there was a quiet Army lieutenant named John Macready — a man who spent the early 1920s collecting aviation...
Share this story At a thousand feet over Wiltshire, pulling out of a vertical dive at five times the force of gravity, Neil Williams heard a bang and felt the airframe lurch. His left wing had begun to fold up. In the next few seconds, the British aerobatic champion...
Share this story For years the Indian Air Force could see the enemy long before it could hit him. Chinese fighters and airborne radar planes carry missiles that reach out past 200 kilometres; India’s Su-30MKI fleet, its heaviest hitter, had nothing that could match...
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