Share this story Stand on the bridge wing of an American aircraft carrier during flight operations and the deck below looks like a paint chart having a nervous breakdown. Yellow, green, red, purple, blue, brown and white, all moving at once, in a space the size of...
Share this story The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it. On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy...
Share this story It was over in four minutes. By the time two Romanian F-16s were airborne from Borcea and a helicopter was lifting out of Bacău, the thing they had been sent to find was already down in a forest outside a town of three thousand people, and...
Share this story Aircrew spend their working lives closer to the sun than almost anyone else, under canopies and windscreens designed for visibility rather than for blocking ultraviolet light. The question of whether that shows up in their medical records has been...
Share this story Steven Bennett had a working parachute. The man sitting behind him did not. That is the whole story, really, and everything else is the detail of how a twenty-six-year-old Air Force captain came to be flying a burning OV-10 Bronco towards the Gulf of...
Share this story On 17 June 2014, RAF Typhoons from 3 (Fighter) Squadron were scrambled to intercept four separate groups of Russian aircraft over the Baltic. The RAF’s own account of what they found reads like this: a Tu-22 Backfire bomber, four Su-27 Flankers,...
Share this story There is an aviation business that never appears at Farnborough. It buys fighter aircraft that no air force wants any more, from countries that need the money, and sells them to countries that are not allowed to buy weapons at all. On Wednesday a...
Share this story At around noon on Wednesday, a fighter in full Royal Canadian Air Force markings lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, with an F-35C flying chase. Bilingual RCAF-ARC lettering on the intakes. A roundel. “Canada” behind the cockpit. A...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September. There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown...
Share this story There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way...
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