Share this story NATO has run a lot of joint procurement competitions. Almost all of them ended with every country buying something different anyway. Exactly one produced an aircraft that three air forces actually flew, in numbers, for decades. It was small, it was...
Share this story There is a simple test for how badly an aircraft designer has run out of room. Look at where the instruments ended up. On the Henschel Hs 129, some of the engine gauges were bolted to the inside faces of the engine nacelles, out in the slipstream,...
Share this story Search for the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 Huckebein and you will find the same sentence over and over: this was the aircraft that became the MiG-15. The swept wing, the nose intake, the tail carried high on the fin — the Soviets took the drawings home in...
Share this story The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it. On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy...
Share this story The Royal Navy spent the first half of the Second World War discovering that a carrier fighter needs a second crew member. Over the ocean there are no landmarks, no roads and no friendly towns, and a single-seat pilot who is busy fighting is a pilot...
Share this story A helicopter is mostly a machine for dealing with the consequences of its own engine. Put a motor in the fuselage and you need a gearbox to get the power up to the rotor, a shaft to carry it, and a tail rotor to stop the fuselage spinning the opposite...
Share this story Britain came within one government decision of fielding a supersonic Harrier. Not a paper study: a funded aircraft with an engine on a test stand and three airframes being built. It was called the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, and the reason it does not...
Share this story Steven Bennett had a working parachute. The man sitting behind him did not. That is the whole story, really, and everything else is the detail of how a twenty-six-year-old Air Force captain came to be flying a burning OV-10 Bronco towards the Gulf of...
Share this story On 1 February 1975, a bare metal F-15A sat on the runway at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, chained to a hold-back device, with both engines in full afterburner. When the hold-back let go, the aircraft was airborne in three seconds. Three...
Share this story In February 1943 the German Air Ministry asked for a single-seat aircraft to attack invasion shipping. Henschel answered with something that looks, even now, like a mistake in the drawing: a small jet with a turbine bolted to its spine, wooden wings,...
Share this story On 19 May 1942 a four-engined bomber lifted off from Ramenskoye, outside Moscow, and turned west towards a continent that Germany controlled from the Atlantic to the Volga. In the fuselage, sitting on a bench in a heavy flying suit with an oxygen mask...
Share this story On 22 September 1946 a four-engined Douglas DC-4 lifted off from Madrid and turned south. Thirty-six hours, three stops and one unscheduled diversion later it landed at Morón in Buenos Aires. Iberia had just become the first European airline to...
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