Share this story No engine. No jet fuel. No rocket. Just a slender white sailplane, its long wings feeding on invisible rivers of rising air, climbing higher than a U-2 spy plane into the freezing black of the stratosphere. In 2018, the engineless Perlan 2 glider...
Share this story Boeing took its most famous creation, the mighty 747 “Jumbo Jet,” and did something almost sacrilegious: it sawed nearly 50 feet out of the middle. The result was a stubby, oddly proportioned jumbo that looked like a 747 caught in a...
Share this story By almost every technical measure, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar was the finest airliner of its generation. It could fly an approach and land itself in thick fog when rivals still needed a pilot’s hands. Its ride was smoother, its systems...
Share this story Look at an old airport photo from the 1970s and you will see it everywhere: a sleek jet with a tall T-tail and three engines clustered around its rear like the fletching on an arrow. This was the Boeing 727, and for a whole generation it was simply...
Share this story On a summer morning in 2024, thousands of people lined the shores of Vancouver Island to say goodbye to a 79-year-old giant. The Hawaii Mars, the largest flying boat still in the air anywhere in the world, lifted off the water one last time, escorted...
Share this story Most fighter jets are built to twist and turn. The MiG-31 Foxhound was built to do something far simpler and far more frightening: go very fast, in a straight line, and catch things nothing else could. Nearly half a century after its first flight, it...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, outnumbered RAF fighter pilots kept turning up in exactly the right place to meet the Luftwaffe, again and again. To the Germans it looked like uncanny luck. It was nothing of the sort. Along the coast of Britain stood a line of...
Share this story On a warm night in the summer of 1915, Londoners looked up from their blacked-out streets and heard something no city had ever heard before: the steady drone of engines coming out of the dark, high overhead. Moments later, bombs began to fall from a...
Share this story In the last spring of the Second World War, Dutch children ran into the open fields as British bombers roared overhead, not to hide, but to wave. Because these Lancasters were not carrying bombs. They were raining down bread, tinned meat and chocolate...
Share this story On the night of Aug. 17, 1943, a rocket engineer named Wernher von Braun walked back to his quarters on a quiet stretch of the German Baltic coast and looked up. A full moon hung over the secret research town of Peenemünde. Then the first flares...
Share this story On the morning of 25 October 1999, a small charter jet lifted off from Orlando bound for Dallas. It was an ordinary hop for six ordinary reasons, a golfer, his agents, a course designer, and two pilots, all with places to be. Within minutes, something...
Share this story Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football...
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