Share this story The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the...
Share this story At 23:34:49 on the night of 1 July 2002, the collision avoidance system aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M over southern Germany told its crew to climb. Seconds later the air traffic controller told them to descend. They descended. On the Boeing 757 converging...
Share this story In April 1944 a Japanese submarine left Lorient carrying the plans for the most advanced interceptor in the world. It reached Singapore on 14 July. Twelve days later, on its way home, USS Sawfish sank it off the Philippines. A second boat carrying the...
Share this story In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won...
Share this story By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel...
Share this story Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately,...
Share this story At about twenty to two on the morning of 28 November 1979, someone in Air New Zealand’s navigation section changed two numbers in a computer. The McMurdo waypoint stored in the ground system moved roughly two degrees and fifteen minutes of...
Share this story Britain had been at war for three days. At quarter past six on the morning of 6 September 1939, a radar station on the Essex coast reported unidentified aircraft approaching at high altitude over West Mersea. There were no German aircraft. The plots...
Share this story The thing hanging under the F-15 was not a bomb. It was a two-stage rocket seventeen feet ten inches long, and inside its nose sat an object the size of a large coffee can that weighed thirty pounds, carried no explosive of any kind, and had no engine...
Share this story A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock. His...
Share this story On a Tuesday evening in September 1909, in the hills behind Piedmont, California, a Chinese machinist took off in a biplane he had designed, built and powered with an engine he had also built, and flew an elliptical circuit around a hilltop for about...
Share this story She had held a pilot’s licence for thirteen months and had forty hours of flying in her logbook, total. The aeroplane was a wood-and-fabric trainer with an eighty-horsepower rotary engine and a service ceiling of about 4,300 metres. Aconcagua,...
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