Share this story Most fighter jets are built to twist and turn. The MiG-31 Foxhound was built to do something far simpler and far more frightening: go very fast, in a straight line, and catch things nothing else could. Nearly half a century after its first flight, it...
Share this story On a warm night in the summer of 1915, Londoners looked up from their blacked-out streets and heard something no city had ever heard before: the steady drone of engines coming out of the dark, high overhead. Moments later, bombs began to fall from a...
Share this story On the night of Aug. 17, 1943, a rocket engineer named Wernher von Braun walked back to his quarters on a quiet stretch of the German Baltic coast and looked up. A full moon hung over the secret research town of Peenemünde. Then the first flares...
Share this story The world’s biggest passenger jet is about to make a lot of surprise appearances, and a lot of surprise disappearances. This September, Emirates is reshuffling a dozen of its Airbus A380 routes, with several long-haul services temporarily...
Share this story Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football...
Share this story On the morning of 15 April 1969, a lumbering four-engine reconnaissance aircraft climbed away from a Japanese airfield on a mission its crew had flown, in one form or another, roughly 200 times in three months without incident. It was routine. It was...
Share this story On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and...
Share this story Alaska Airlines has spent barely sixteen months turning itself from a West Coast workhorse into a transatlantic contender, and it is not slowing down. On 20 August 2026 the Seattle carrier confirmed two new European destinations: Paris and Athens,...
Share this story Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in...
Share this story The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of...
Share this story Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and...
Share this story Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the...
Recent Comments