Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer’s pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone...
Share this story In 1960 and 1961, thirteen American women pilots went through the same punishing medical tests used to pick the Mercury Seven astronauts. They swallowed rubber tubes, had ice water poured into their ears and pedalled weighted bicycles to exhaustion....
Share this story In August 1929, most people had never been in an aeroplane, and nobody had flown around the world in anything as comfortable as a hotel. Then a silver airship 236 metres long drifted over Tokyo, then over the Pacific, then over Los Angeles, with a...
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran’s air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters...
Share this story In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story The Bay of Pigs is remembered as a landing that failed on the beach. It was lost in the air. Over five days in April 1961, a handful of Cuban pilots in old British piston fighters and American-built jet trainers beat a CIA air force, sank the ships...
Share this story A little before one o’clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: “Arizona”. It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis...
Share this story Picture it: two four-engine transports dropping out of the Patagonian night onto an Argentine runway, roughly 2,000 feet apart. Their ramps come down while the propellers are still turning, and dozens of SAS soldiers pour out to find and destroy a...
Share this story On 27 October 1954, a 41-year-old colonel working at Far East Air Forces headquarters in Tokyo was promoted to brigadier general. With that single star, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first African-American general in the United States Air Force, 72...
Share this story Buzz Aldrin is remembered as the second man on the Moon. Sixteen years earlier, he was a 23-year-old US Air Force lieutenant flying the F-86 Sabre over the north-western corner of North Korea, near the Chinese border, where the MiG-15 came across the...
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