Share this story On the afternoon of 1 November 2011, a Boeing 767 slid down a runway at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport on its belly, spraying sparks and foam, with 231 people aboard and not a single wheel beneath it. When it stopped, everyone walked away. Some...
Share this story The story is irresistible: in the depths of the Second World War, a colossal six-engine German bomber slips across the Atlantic, flies to within sight of the Manhattan skyline, photographs Long Island, and turns for home before America ever knows it...
Share this story It was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, and one of the most complete. Bigger, faster and longer-legged than the Mirage 2000 it grew from, the Dassault Mirage 4000 was France’s bid to build a true heavyweight, a...
Share this story Long before the Tomahawk, and years before Polaris let a submarine fire a nuclear missile from beneath the waves, America’s first seagoing deterrent worked in the most nerve-wracking way imaginable. To shoot, the submarine had to surface in...
Share this story Just after dawn on October 25, 1944, lookouts on a cluster of small American ships off the island of Samar saw something that should not have been there: pagoda masts on the horizon. The most powerful surface fleet Japan could still put to sea —...
Share this story Twenty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set foot on the summit of Mount Everest, two men in open-cockpit biplanes looked down on it from above. On April 3, 1933, a small British expedition did something that sounds impossible for the...
Share this story In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flying night missions over Europe began to see something they could not explain. Glowing balls of light, orange and red, would appear beside their aircraft and pace them through the dark, matching...
Share this story Twenty-one years ago today, on August 14, 2005, a Boeing 737 crossed the sky over Greece with everyone aboard already beyond saving. It flew straight and level, obedient to its autopilot, holding its assigned altitude and following its route as if...
Share this story For forty years, aviation enthusiasts have chased a ghost. It has a name, a rumored shape, and a trail of strange evidence. What it does not have is a single confirmed photograph, a serial number, or an admission that it was ever built. The ghost is...
Share this story In the darkest years of the Cold War, American engineers designed a weapon so appalling that many of the people building it were relieved when it was cancelled. It was a cruise missile with an unshielded nuclear reactor for an engine, and it was meant...
Share this story On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it...
Share this story In the autumn of 1942, the strangest fighter in America sat on a dry lakebed in the Mojave wearing a lie. Whenever the aircraft was parked in the open, ground crews bolted a dummy wooden propeller to its nose, because the machine hidden beneath the...
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