Share this story On 1 July 1915, near Lunéville in eastern France, a young German lieutenant in a small monoplane closed on a French Morane-Saulnier parasol and did something no fighter pilot had yet done successfully in combat. He aimed his whole aircraft at...
Share this story Picture the job description. You sit strapped into a fighter perched on a rail over the bow of a cargo ship, somewhere in the North Atlantic. When an enemy bomber appears, rockets fire you off the front of the ship. You fight. And then, because there...
Share this story Early on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, two Israeli F-4E Phantoms sat on alert at Ofira, the air base at Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. The sirens went off. The controller did not scramble them. On the radar screens, a formation...
Share this story From the air, the patch of green on Akutan Island looked perfect: flat, grassy, a gift for a pilot with a dying engine. Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga lowered his wheels and set up to land. The grass was hiding water. The moment his main gear touched,...
Share this story On 2 September 1944, a 20-year-old US Navy pilot named George Herbert Walker Bush flew his TBM Avenger into the flak over Chichijima, a small Japanese-held island in the Bonin chain north of Iwo Jima. His target was the island’s radio station....
Share this story On Thursday 7 September 1944, Duncan Sandys, the British minister in charge of countering Germany’s secret weapons, told the press that the flying-bomb threat to London was essentially finished. “Except possibly for a few last shots, the...
Share this story It was small, slow and oddly shaped, with two rotors that swung through each other like the blades of an eggbeater. Yet the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, better known by its radio callsign “Pedro”, flew more rescue missions in Vietnam than all other...
Share this story Nicole Malachowski was five years old when she watched military jets at an air show and decided that was what she would do with her life. It was a perfectly reasonable ambition, except for one detail nobody mentioned to her at the time. The United...
Share this story On 15 December 1989, a brand-new KLM Boeing 747-400 was descending towards Anchorage, Alaska, on its way from Amsterdam to Tokyo. The day before, Mount Redoubt, about 150 miles away, had erupted. Somewhere in the grey winter sky over the Alaskan...
Share this story For decades, the Royal Thai Air Force’s F-16s flew exercises, air shows and the occasional scramble. On 24 July 2025 they went to war. As a border dispute with Cambodia exploded into open fighting, Thai F-16s dropped guided bombs on Cambodian...
Share this story Fifty-two minutes after leaving New York, the pilots of Swissair Flight 111 noticed an unusual smell in the cockpit. It was the evening of 2 September 1998, the MD-11 was cruising at 33,000 feet over the Atlantic south of Nova Scotia, and nothing else...
Share this story On the night of 10 March 1968, nineteen American airmen were living on top of a mountain in a country where, officially, there were no American troops at all. Phou Pha Thi rises more than a mile above northeastern Laos, with sheer cliffs on one side....
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