Share this story On the morning of 11 September 1962, the President of the United States stepped off his aircraft at the Redstone Arsenal airfield in Huntsville, Alabama, and shook hands with the man who had built Hitler’s V-2. Wernher von Braun, now director of...
Share this story In early 1942, a woman in Washington, D.C. commuted to her office in Baltimore every day in her own aeroplane. Her husband mentioned it to his boss, Colonel William H. Tunner, who was scouring the country for pilots to deliver new aircraft from...
Share this story At 5:17 in the morning of 8 May 1927, a white biplane staggered off the grass at Le Bourget, so heavy with fuel that it barely cleared the trees at the end of the field. In the open cockpit sat two of France’s great airmen: Charles Nungesser,...
Share this story It was May Day 1960, and the Soviet Union was celebrating. Somewhere above 70,000 feet over the Ural Mountains, a lone American pilot in a glider-winged jet was photographing its secrets. Francis Gary Powers had taken off from Peshawar in Pakistan on...
Share this story Seven years after he became the first human being in space, Yuri Gagarin was back in a very ordinary cockpit. On the morning of 27 March 1968 he climbed into a two-seat MiG-15UTI jet trainer at Chkalovsky air base near Moscow, with his instructor...
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Share this story “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck by a missile.” The call came over the radio late in the Vietnam War, as a KC-135 Stratotanker crew was finishing a refuelling mission over Southeast Asia and getting ready to turn for home....
Share this story On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in...
Share this story At 8:40 on the morning of 15 June 1919, a big biplane came out of the low cloud over County Galway. The pilot saw a flat green field near the Marconi wireless station at Clifden and put the aircraft down. The field was a bog. The wheels sank, the nose...
Share this story By February 1944 the Allies had a deadline. The invasion of France was coming in the summer, and it could not succeed with the Luftwaffe still able to contest the skies over the beaches. The German fighter force had to be broken first. The weather...
Share this story Picture a bomber crew in 1942, briefed to hit a Japanese-held island far out along the chain. The target will probably be under cloud. The base they return to may be under fog by then. The wind on the runway could go from calm to hurricane force in...
Share this story Thunderstorms had kept the Hindenburg circling for hours. When the giant airship finally turned in towards the mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the evening of 6 May 1937, reporters, photographers and newsreel crews were...
Recent Comments