Share this story Kelly Johnson gave the Skunk Works the SR-71 and the U-2. But it was his successor, a chubby, wisecracking thermodynamicist named Ben Rich, who took an idea most engineers thought was absurd — an aircraft you couldn’t see on radar —...
Share this story For most of a century, an airliner was a machine made of aluminium — hundreds of thousands of sheets, frames and rivets bolted into a metal tube. Then Boeing rolled out the 787 Dreamliner, and the industry’s most fundamental building...
Share this story Here is a problem every fighter pilot eventually faces: you are behind an enemy jet, you have the advantage — and you are going too fast. Keep pulling and you will rocket right past him, handing him your tail. Ease off and he escapes. The...
Share this story In the early 1950s, neutral Sweden set out to build a supersonic interceptor unlike anything else in the world — a fighter with a strange, folded ‘double-delta’ wing. It was such a radical idea that no one could be sure the shape...
Share this story When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51...
Share this story You cannot see it, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Behind every aircraft that is making lift trail two invisible tornadoes of spinning air — wake turbulence. Fly into the wake of a big jet at the wrong moment and a smaller aircraft...
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell F3H Demon is remembered for what it led to. Underpowered, dangerous in its early years, and saddled with one of the worst engines in naval-aviation history, the Demon nonetheless taught its...
Share this story Before he was a reclusive billionaire, before the movies and the mania, Howard Hughes was a young man obsessed with going fast. In 1935 that obsession took the shape of a single, gorgeous silver aeroplane — the Hughes H-1 Racer — and with...
Share this story He never became a general, never commanded a wing, and spent much of his career infuriating his superiors. Yet John Boyd may have shaped modern air combat more than any pilot who ever lived. He rewrote how fighters are flown, how they are designed,...
Share this story When ten jets pour off the top of a loop trailing green, white and red smoke, an entire country looks up. The Frecce Tricolori — the Tricolour Arrows — are Italy’s national aerobatic team and, by sheer number of aircraft, the biggest...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Share this story It usually announces itself with a bang — a sharp, cannon-like crack from the engine, sometimes a tongue of flame out the intake or exhaust, and a stomach-dropping sag in thrust. To a passenger it sounds like the engine has exploded. Usually, it...
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