Share this story An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL...
Share this story Grumman set out to build the finest carrier fighter of the Second World War: a twin-engine brute that could outrun and outgun anything in the sky and haul a bomber’s worth of ordnance off a flight deck. It succeeded. The Tigercat was...
Share this story Somewhere under the muddy shallows of Wassaw Sound, off the coast of Georgia, sits a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb. The United States Air Force dropped it there in 1958, searched for ten weeks, gave up, and has left it alone ever since. It is one of a...
Share this story Shortly after 11 a.m. on 16 August 1942, a sagging, half-deflated US Navy blimp came drifting low over the rooftops of Daly City, California, snagging telephone wires as a crowd chased it through the streets. It finally sank onto the pavement in front...
Share this story Two months after a Soviet missile knocked Gary Powers and his U-2 out of the sky, another American aircraft was hunting the edges of the same empire. On 1 July 1960, a Boeing RB-47H was flying a lonely electronic-reconnaissance mission high over the...
Share this story Britain has decided that its Army no longer needs a dedicated scout helicopter. Under the Defence Investment Plan published on 30 June 2026, all 34 of the British Army’s Leonardo Wildcat AH1 reconnaissance helicopters will begin leaving service...
Share this story The order is worth SEK 10.1 billion — a little over one billion US dollars. It covers two of the most sophisticated surveillance aircraft flying today. And the customer? Saab will not say. Not the country, not the air force, not a single...
Share this story Curtiss was once one of the giants of American aviation. It built the fighters that fought the First World War, the racing seaplanes that set world records in the 1920s, and the P-40 Warhawks whose shark-mouthed noses became a symbol of the Second...
Share this story The sky over Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 belonged almost entirely to the attackers. Almost. While battleships burned and most American aircraft were destroyed on the ground, a handful of pilots managed to get airborne and fight...
Share this story Most fighter aces fight one enemy. Witold Urbanowicz fought two of history’s most feared air forces — the Luftwaffe over England and the Imperial Japanese over China — and beat them both. The Polish pilot did it while exiled from a...
Share this story He wore a cravat instead of a regulation tie, no rank insignia, and often a borrowed uniform. He nearly washed out of flight training. And yet Adrian “Warby” Warburton became the most decorated photo-reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air...
Share this story In 1941, the biggest movie star to put on a uniform was not sent to make training films or sell war bonds — though the Army very much wanted him to. James Stewart, fresh off an Academy Award, wanted to fly bombers into Germany. And he had to...
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