Share this story Its own crews called it “the Beast.” Less politely, they said the letters SB2C stood for “Son of a Bitch, 2nd Class.” An MIT professor who studied a model of it in a wind tunnel declared that anyone who built more than one...
Share this story On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all...
Share this story Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with...
Share this story Every test pilot who flew it seemed to reach for superlatives. One of the greatest aviators of the century called it outstanding. Another, a man who would later fly jets to the edge of control, called it simply the best aircraft he had ever flown. The...
Share this story When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name...
Share this story The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy...
Share this story Of all the strange machines the Second World War produced, few are as gloriously, defiantly odd as the one a British engineer built in 1942: an ordinary army Jeep, bolted to a spinning rotor, meant to be towed into the sky behind a bomber and flown...
Share this story By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down...
Share this story In American memory, the Brewster Buffalo is a punchline: a fat, underpowered little barrel of a fighter that was massacred at Midway and written off as one of the worst aircraft of the war. Its own pilots called it a flying coffin. Fly two thousand...
Share this story By 1952 the jet age had well and truly arrived. Swept-wing MiGs and Sabres were tearing across the skies of Korea at close to the speed of sound, and the propeller-driven fighter looked like a museum piece. Nobody told the Hawker Sea Fury. On a August...
Share this story He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest...
Share this story On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball...
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