Share this story On 21 October 1937, NKVD officers arrested Vladimir Petlyakov, one of the Soviet Union’s best aircraft engineers, along with Andrei Tupolev and the leadership of the TsAGI institute. The charges of sabotage and espionage were invented. Many of...
Share this story A B-52 lifts off from Minot in North Dakota, a Minuteman III sits in a silo somewhere under the Great Plains, and an Ohio-class submarine cruises silently at an undisclosed point in the ocean. Together they form the United States nuclear triad: three...
Share this story At 18:48 German time on 7 September 1940, a Luftwaffe camera caught one of the defining images of the Second World War: a lone Heinkel He 111 drifting over Wapping, its shadow-black wings laid across the bend of the Thames and the docks of East...
Share this story Shortly before noon on Tuesday 10 November, a two-seat jet trainer touched down at Gangshan Air Force Base in southern Taiwan and kept going. Its brakes had failed. One main-wheel tyre burst, the jet veered off the runway and its main landing gear was...
Share this story At 19:20 on 21 September 2017, two minutes before the end of civil twilight, a United States Army UH-60M Black Hawk was flying at about 300 feet over the water near Hoffman Island, off Staten Island. It was the lead aircraft of a flight of two, on a...
Share this story On the morning of 29 March 2016, EgyptAir flight MS181, an Airbus A320 on the short domestic hop from Alexandria’s Borg El Arab airport to Cairo, turned north instead and landed at Larnaca in Cyprus. A passenger had told the crew he was wearing...
Share this story In November 1987, two inspectors at Aloha Airlines climbed onto scaffolding beside a Boeing 737 that had been flying since 1969 and worked their way along its lap joints, rivet by rivet, with a bright light. The airworthiness directive they were...
Share this story On a spring Saturday at Budörs airfield on the edge of Budapest, a polished silver airliner in 1950s Malév colours coughs its two nine-cylinder radials into life and taxies out across the grass. Most onlookers would call it a Douglas DC-3....
Share this story A soldier crouches in dry grass and a launch tube no longer than his arm coughs out a small missile. Before it has cleared the treeline its wings have snapped open and an electric motor has taken over. For the next quarter of an hour it will circle...
Share this story Before dawn on 1 September 1983, a silver Soviet interceptor sat a few hundred metres off the wingtip of a Boeing 747 high above Sakhalin Island. The fighter’s pilot could see the airliner’s flashing lights and its long double row of...
Share this story Outside a building in Everett, Washington, inside a steel cage painted a startling shade of blue, a Boeing 777-9 is flying. It will never leave the ground. It has no engines, no paint and no passengers. It is the fourth 777-9 Boeing built, and it was...
Share this story On the afternoon of Wednesday 6 April 1966, a Soviet jet with a failing engine came down out of the sky over West Berlin, missed the houses along the Heerstrasse, and plunged into a small lake called the Stößensee. Only part of its tail fin...
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