Share this story It was a bright, ordinary afternoon in Florida. At about two o’clock on 5 December 1945, five Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers rumbled off the runway at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation exercise. Fourteen men, a clear sky, a...
Share this story At 75,000 feet over the Baltic Sea, the world is dark blue above and curved below, and the only sound in the cockpit is the hiss of the pressure suit. On the morning of 29 June 1987, that calm ended with a bang.The right engine of Lt. Col. Duane...
Share this story The attack helicopter has spent the last few years being written off. Ukraine’s skies, thick with man-portable missiles and cheap drones, have looked like an unkind place for a low, slow gunship. Europe’s answer is not to retire its Tiger — but to...
Share this story A grey warship longer than three football fields is steaming through the Pacific, and stealth fighters are dropping onto its deck. For most navies that would be unremarkable. For Japan, it is something close to historic — because for eighty years,...
Share this story On 26 June, an EVA Air Boeing 787 will lift off from Taipei, point its nose east, and not come down until it reaches Washington Dulles. It sounds routine. It is, in fact, a first: there has never been a nonstop flight between Taiwan and the capital of...
Share this story For more than sixty years, “Air Force One” has meant one specific shade of pale blue — the robin’s-egg scheme drawn up for John F. Kennedy in 1962. On 19 June, a different 747 rolled into the light inside a hangar at Joint Base Andrews, and the blue...
Share this story It sounds like paperwork: a pilot from one Air Force unit flew an aircraft alongside a pilot from another. Except the aircraft was the B-21 Raider — the most secret new warplane in the world — and one of the men at the controls was a frontline combat...
Share this story For as long as anyone could remember, getting from Montreal to Dakar meant flying the wrong way first. North-east to Paris or Brussels, a layover, then back south to Senegal — a journey of twelve hours or more to reach a city that sits almost due east...
Share this story For years, the race to build “robot wingmen” — uncrewed jets that fight alongside human pilots — looked like an American and Australian story. In a single week in June, Europe planted its flag.At the ILA air show in Berlin, two very different European...
Share this story On 16 June a brand-new F-35A lifted off from Fort Worth, flew for about an hour, and came home behind a chase jet. Routine — except for two black letters painted on its tail: WW.Those letters make aircraft 24-5970 the first F-35 ever to wear the Wild...
Share this story It looks, at a glance, like a rich man’s toy: a sleek Bombardier business jet, the kind that ferries executives between capitals. Then you notice the lumps. A long blade running down its spine, blisters under the belly, a fairing crowning the tail —...
Share this story On the morning of 2 June, a pale green, primer-coated jet lifted off from Toulouse and climbed past 41,000 feet over the south of France. It carried no passengers, only test instrumentation and a hand-picked Airbus crew. It also carried a title: the...
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