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 Somewhere over Bedfordshire on an October afternoon, an easyJet Airbus and a Jet2 Boeing slide past each other at 35,000 feet, their contrails crossing in a giant X. Their safety does not depend on spotting each other. It depends on a number both...
Share this story It is the middle of the night over stormy country, and the windscreen of a KC-135 Stratotanker suddenly fills with light. Violet and blue tendrils branch across the glass like living lightning, crawling and flickering, while the instruments glow...
Share this story Four hundred feet above a moonlit field in occupied France, a bomber painted glossy black slows to just above stalling speed. Below, three flashlights in a row and a fourth at a right angle mark the spot. In the belly, a man in a padded jump suit sits...
Share this story Snow is falling on a dark winter morning, and your airliner has not moved from the de-icing pad. A truck with a cherry-picker basket rolls alongside and a worker blasts the wings with a steaming orange liquid. Minutes later comes a second pass, this...
Share this story Seventy miles south of Hanoi, a steel bridge 540 feet long sat on a single concrete pier in the middle of the Song Ma river. It carried the only railway in the North Vietnamese panhandle, with a road lane on either side. Locals called it Ham Rong: the...
Share this story Somewhere tonight a Boeing 737 will touch down harder than the crew intended. The cabin will jolt, a few people will say something unrepeatable, and everyone will carry on. It happens several hundred times a day somewhere in the world and it is almost...
Share this story After the hottest summer Britain has ever recorded, the government has decided that some wildfires are simply out of reach for firefighters on foot. Its answer is in the hangars of the Royal Air Force: the twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook and the A400M Atlas...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Share this story On 14 September 1939, two weeks after war broke out in Europe, a 50-year-old engineer in a business suit and a felt hat climbed into an open frame of steel tubes in Stratford, Connecticut. Ropes tied the machine to the ground. When Igor Sikorsky...
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, C.R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, picked up the telephone and would not put it down. On the other end was Donald Douglas, who had a perfectly good airliner, the DC-2, and no particular wish to build another. Smith...
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