Share this story Picture it: two four-engine transports dropping out of the Patagonian night onto an Argentine runway, roughly 2,000 feet apart. Their ramps come down while the propellers are still turning, and dozens of SAS soldiers pour out to find and destroy a...
Share this story On 27 October 1954, a 41-year-old colonel working at Far East Air Forces headquarters in Tokyo was promoted to brigadier general. With that single star, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first African-American general in the United States Air Force, 72...
Share this story Buzz Aldrin is remembered as the second man on the Moon. Sixteen years earlier, he was a 23-year-old US Air Force lieutenant flying the F-86 Sabre over the north-western corner of North Korea, near the Chinese border, where the MiG-15 came across the...
Share this story On 3 July 1936, Short Brothers’ chief test pilot John Lankester Parker took a brand-new flying boat out onto the River Medway at Rochester for what was meant to be nothing more than taxi trials. The big silver hull handled so well that Parker...
Share this story On the morning of 26 October 1940, a bare-metal fighter with no paint and not even a name sat waiting at Mines Field, the small Los Angeles airfield that would one day become LAX. Freelance test pilot Vance Breese climbed in, started the Allison V-12...
Share this story At 06:45 on the morning of 26 October 1942, an American scout pilot north of the Santa Cruz Islands found what every carrier admiral in the Pacific was looking for: the flight decks of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s main body. Thirteen minutes...
Share this story On 26 October 1958, with military bands playing on the ramp at New York’s Idlewild Airport, 111 passengers climbed the airstairs of a gleaming Pan American Boeing 707-121. On her nose, in neat script, was her name: Clipper America. Her...
Share this story Electrician’s Mate Orville Bethard thought the worst of 25 October 1944 was behind him. His escort carrier, USS St. Lo, had just survived more than two hours under fire from Japanese battleships off Samar. The enemy fleet had turned away....
Share this story At 05:30 on 25 October 1983, the first Army Rangers stepped out of a Hercules over the south-western tip of Grenada. They jumped from about 500 feet, low enough to stay under the anti-aircraft fire. Below them lay a half-finished runway, blocked with...
Share this story Shortly before midnight on 14 May 1982, Royal Navy Sea Kings clattered in low over the dark, wind-scoured grass of a small island north of West Falkland. Out of them climbed about 45 men of D Squadron, 22 Special Air Service, each loaded with mortar...
Share this story In the last week of January 1991, American AWACS crews over the Gulf watched something nobody had predicted. Iraqi jets were taking off, staying low and running hard, not towards the coalition and not towards friendly Jordan, but east, towards Iran....
Share this story On 10 January 1956, ground crews in Turkey and West Germany let go of the first nine of hundreds of giant plastic balloons. Each one carried a camera gondola about the size of a refrigerator. The cover story said they were studying the weather. In...
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