Share this story Imagine you are a fighter pilot who has just bailed out over a cold, heaving sea, far from land, with the enemy coast in sight. You are alone in the swell — until you hear engines, and a big, ungainly flying boat drops out of the sky, lands on...
Share this story Some aircraft are ugly and effective. A very few are beautiful and useless. The Republic XF-12 Rainbow was that rarest thing: an aeroplane so aerodynamically pure it looked sculpted — and so perfectly built for a mission that, by the time it...
Share this story Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft...
Share this story In the spring of 1942, young American pilots training in Florida had a grim joke about the sleek new bomber they were learning to fly: “one a day in Tampa Bay.” It was barely an exaggeration. The Martin B-26 Marauder was killing its own...
Share this story There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is...
Share this story German fighter pilots had a name for the big four-engined British flying boat they kept meeting over the Atlantic: the Fliegendes Stachelschwein — the “flying porcupine.” They earned that respect the hard way. Attacking a lone Short...
Share this story At 7:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day 1929, a fat, three-engined Fokker lifted off from a field near Los Angeles and simply refused to come down. For the next six days, seven hours and forty minutes, it stayed in the air — sleeping,...
Share this story The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still...
Share this story On 11 June 1940, the people of Malta looked up at a sky suddenly full of Italian bombers and saw, rising to meet them, a handful of fabric-and-wire biplanes that looked like relics from the last war. They were relics. And for ten desperate days, they...
Share this story An offshore patrol vessel is, as a rule, a modest thing: a hull built for endurance, a single medium gun, a job description that runs to fisheries protection and chasing smugglers. The United Arab Emirates has looked at that formula and, politely,...
Share this story For nearly half a century, the growl of the A-10 Warthog was the soundtrack of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. On 29 July, that sound faded for good — and now the Air Force is moving fast to fill the silence with something very different. With the...
Share this story The U.S. Navy’s two great ocean-watchers already work as a pair. Now they are learning to talk directly to each other — and one of them is about to start taking orders straight from the other’s cockpit. On 5 August, Boeing and...
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