Share this story It is just after ten in the morning on 19 June 1944, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander Vraciu is hanging in the blue over the Philippine Sea, hood back, oxygen mask tight, hunting. Below and ahead of his Grumman F6F Hellcat, a loose gaggle of...
Share this story It is the morning of 28 March 1910, and a thin mist still clings to the Étang de Berre, the great salt lagoon west of Marseille. A 27-year-old engineer named Henri Fabre sits astride a slender wooden beam, perched above three flat floats that bob...
Share this story It is mid-morning on 8 June 2026 at Ellington Field in Houston, and Harry “D-Day” Daye is strapping into a machine that has not left the ground in seven years. The ramp smells of jet fuel and Texas heat. Behind him sits Jerod Flohr, one of the...
Share this story There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked an audacious question: what if a jet fighter did not need a runway, or even an aircraft carrier? What if it could simply take off from the open sea? Convair’s answer was one of the strangest warplanes ever flown...
Share this story Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful,...
Share this story At the Farnborough air show in 1953, the crowd hears it before they see it. Ten engines, building from a hum to a roar, and then the largest all-metal flying boat ever built slides overhead — a silver whale of an aircraft, a 219-foot wing, an...
Share this story Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence...
Share this story It is 21 October 1929, and 169 people are about to do something no group of human beings has ever done: leave the ground together, in a single aircraft. On the surface of Lake Constance sits the reason — a flying boat so vast that the men...
Share this story On the morning of 2 September 1958, a four-engined transport drones eastward through the clear sky near the Turkish-Soviet border. To anyone who glanced up, it is just a C-130 Hercules — an unglamorous cargo hauler. It is not. Tail number 60528...
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
Share this story The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is...
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