Share this story In 1964, France joined the nuclear club on its own terms. Refusing to depend on American or British weapons, it built a sleek supersonic delta to carry its own bomb — a two-seat, twin-engined thoroughbred that could dash toward Moscow at twice...
Share this story Most Vietnam-era warplanes are long gone — melted into scrap or bolted to a museum pole. The OV-10 Bronco keeps refusing to leave. Built to fight guerrillas in the 1960s, the funny little twin-boom turboprop has come roaring back again and...
Share this story By a decades-old agreement between the U.S. services, the Army isn’t really supposed to fly its own combat aeroplanes — that job belongs to the Air Force. The Grumman OV-1 Mohawk is the great exception: a stubby, triple-tailed, bug-eyed...
Share this story Everyone remembers the Airbus A380 as the great double-decker of the skies. Almost nobody remembers that France built one two generations earlier. In 1953, Air France put into service a broad-shouldered, four-engined airliner with two full passenger...
Share this story It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no...
Share this story By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave...
Share this story In the opening minutes of Octopussy (1983), Roger Moore’s James Bond escapes an exploding hangar in a jet barely bigger than he is, outruns a heat-seeking missile, then coasts up to a petrol station and deadpans: “Fill her up,...
Share this story On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank...
Share this story In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the...
Share this story Most water bombers are propeller aircraft, and for good reason: they fly low and slow over fires, scooping and dropping in tight mountain valleys. The Beriev Be-200 does it all on jet power. It skims a lake at nearly 220 km/h, swallows 12 tonnes of...
Share this story On a freezing January evening in 1989, a nearly new Boeing 737 fell out of the sky less than a kilometre short of the runway and struck the embankment of the M1 motorway. Forty-seven of the 126 people on board died. The cruel twist: the engine that...
Share this story On a warm Sunday afternoon in August 2024, a crimson-and-white flying boat the size of an airliner lifted off a lake on Vancouver Island for the last time. Tens of thousands of people lined the shore. Nine red Snowbirds jets slid into formation...
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