Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the...
Diese Geschichte teilen: Frank Kendall, der von Juli 2021 bis Januar 2025 als US-Luftwaffenminister amtierte, argumentierte Anfang September 2026 drei Tage lang an drei verschiedenen Stellen gleich: in einem Meinungsbeitrag in der New York Times am 1. September, in einem Interview auf...
Teilen Sie diese Geschichte: Als Amy Johnson am 5. Mai 1930 in Croydon mit Ziel Australien startete, besaß sie erst seit zehn Monaten eine Pilotenlizenz und war noch nie weiter als von London nach Hull geflogen. Ihr Flugzeug war eine gebrauchte de Havilland Gipsy Moth mit offenem Cockpit….
Share this story On 2 June 1944, B-17s of the Fifteenth Air Force bombed marshalling yards in Hungary and then kept going east. They landed in Ukraine, at three Soviet airfields the Red Army had handed over to the Americans. It was the first time in the war that a...
Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
Share this story Ask anyone which airliner first broke the sound barrier and they will say Concorde. They will be wrong by seven years — and by one very ordinary-looking Douglas jetliner that most people have completely forgotten. On 21 August 1961, a standard Douglas...
Share this story In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load...
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a quiet man in a business suit walked up to the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. A few hours later he would step out of...
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