Share this story Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them...
Share this story It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours,...
Share this story On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the...
Share this story A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of...
Share this story Off the south coast of England, a small black flying wing shot off a catapult rail bolted to the deck of a moving Royal Navy ship, climbed away on a whining turbojet, and flew itself to a target. No pilot, no recovery, no second chances — the Nyan is...
Share this story Somewhere in the Pacific in the coming weeks, a US Navy cruiser that fired Tomahawks in two wars will be hit by torpedoes, missiles and bombs until she slips under — and the people shooting will be her friends. The decommissioned USS Mobile Bay is...
Share this story The US Army has looked hard at Ukraine and drawn a precise, uncomfortable conclusion: there is no longer any such thing as a safe place on a battlefield. Its answer, formalised in a redesignation ceremony at Joint Base Lewis-McChord on June 18, is a...
Share this story Among the tall ships and grey hulls that filled New York Harbor for America’s 250th birthday, the strangest silhouette wasn’t a ship at all. Lashed to the flight deck of USS Nimitz, between rows of Super Hornets, sat a windowless grey machine with...
Share this story On July 4, virtually everything in the US military that flies made an appearance over Washington. Three bombers in one formation. Eight Thunderbirds. A brand-new Air Force One with a Raptor escort. The one aircraft everybody on the internet was...
Share this story The thermometer read over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd on the National Mall had been baking since morning, and somewhere above the haze four F-5 Tigers were pulling into formation. One of them was flown by the administrator of NASA himself. It...
Share this story On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and...
Share this story At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved...
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