Share this story The thermometer read over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd on the National Mall had been baking since morning, and somewhere above the haze four F-5 Tigers were pulling into formation. One of them was flown by the administrator of NASA himself. It...
Share this story In the autumn of 1932, a small, barrel-chested aeroplane painted red and white sat on a Cleveland airfield looking less like an aircraft than a cartoon of one. It was almost all engine — a giant radial nose bolted to a stubby fuselage, with the...
Share this story Saturday morning, 28 July 1945. New York is wrapped in fog so thick that the top third of the Empire State Building has simply vanished. At 9:40 a.m., office workers on the 79th floor hear a sound no office worker should ever hear: aircraft engines,...
Share this story On the morning of 16 August 1966, an Iraqi Air Force captain named Munir Redfa strapped into his MiG-21F-13 for what his squadron believed was a routine long-range training sortie. He had full fuel tanks — a privilege he had rarely been granted...
Share this story In the spring of 2023, Poland became the first NATO country to send fighter jets to Ukraine — fourteen MiG-29s, handed over while other capitals were still debating. Three years later, the last fourteen Fulcrums in Polish service were supposed...
Share this story The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was never the fastest, highest-climbing, or most manoeuvrable fighter of the Second World War. What it was, in every theatre from North Africa to China to the Aleutians, was available — and in the hands of pilots who...
Share this story On the morning of 3 July 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 lifted off from Bandar Abbas International Airport bound for Dubai — a routine 28-minute hop across the Strait of Hormuz. Seven minutes later, the Airbus A300 was falling out of the sky in pieces,...
On the morning of April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Fighter Two airstrip on Guadalcanal and turned west over the Solomon Sea. Their mission was not to engage enemy formations or escort bombers. It was to kill one man: Admiral Isoroku...
Share this story It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers...
Share this story It is the morning of 5 May 1945, on the wooded slopes of Gearhart Mountain in southern Oregon. The Reverend Archie Mitchell has driven his pregnant wife, Elsie, and five children from his Sunday school up for a picnic. As Archie parks the car, the...
Share this story Late in the afternoon of 7 June 1981, eight Israeli F-16s are skimming the desert at rooftop height, fuel gauges a constant worry. Flying the last and most exposed aircraft in the formation is the youngest of them, a 27-year-old named Ilan Ramon, who...
Share this story It is a little after dawn on 15 August 1945, and a flight of Grumman F6F Hellcats is droning north over the haze of Tokyo Bay. In the cockpits are young U.S. Navy pilots of Air Group 88, launched from the carrier USS Yorktown to strike airfields near...
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