Share this story By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down...
Share this story By 1952 the jet age had well and truly arrived. Swept-wing MiGs and Sabres were tearing across the skies of Korea at close to the speed of sound, and the propeller-driven fighter looked like a museum piece. Nobody told the Hawker Sea Fury. On a August...
Share this story He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest...
Share this story On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball...
Share this story Big American weapons programs have a reputation, and it is not for finishing early. So when the general in charge of the two most important jets in the U.S. Air Force’s future stands up and says both are running ahead of schedule, it is worth a second...
Share this story For decades, if you wanted to put an engine in an American F-15 or F-16, you had exactly two phone numbers to call: Pratt & Whitney and GE. That cozy arrangement may be about to end. On August 4 the U.S. Air Force went public with a Request for...
Share this story Look closely at the KC-135 that touched down at RAF Mildenhall on the afternoon of August 2 and something does not add up. The fuselage wears the serial 63-8017. The tail wears a different one: 63-8002. This is one airframe stitched together from two...
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 June 1994, a 250-ton bomber wheeled around the control tower at Fairchild Air Force Base in a bank no B-52 was ever meant to hold. The left wing kept dropping — past 60 degrees, past 90 — until the giant simply...
Share this story On 24 November 1944, a bombardier lay over his bombsight five and a half miles above Tokyo, cross-hairs settled on the Nakajima engine works, and watched his bombs miss by a mile. Not because his aim was bad — because something invisible had...
Share this story Ask which fighter the RAF prized most in the last year of the Second World War and most people will say the Spitfire. They would be wrong. The aircraft that its pilots rated above all others — faster on the deck than a Spitfire, deadlier against...
Share this story Ask anyone to name Britain’s heavy bomber of the Second World War and they will say the Avro Lancaster — the Dam Busters’ mount, the star of every film and airshow flypast. Almost nobody says Handley Page Halifax. Yet the Halifax...
Share this story Most warplanes are lucky to see one war. The Douglas A-26 Invader saw three — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — the only American bomber ever to do so. Now one of these remarkable survivors has a new home: the Stockton Field Aviation...
Recent Comments