Share this story Look at almost any jet airliner and the engines are in one of two places: slung under the wings, or bolted to the tail. Now look at the VFW-614. Its two engines sit on pylons on top of the wings — a layout almost no other airliner in history has ever...
Share this story Long before anyone talked about “loyal wingman” drones flying off crewed jets, the Soviet Union built the real thing: a flying aircraft carrier. A single giant bomber would haul as many as five fighters into the sky, cut them loose in mid-air — and,...
Share this story On a spring morning in May 2026, a big blue Grumman Avenger lifted off over Hamilton, Ontario, and climbed into the sky for the first time in decades. In the cockpit was pilot James Bradley. Watching from the ground was a small group of people who had...
Share this story On the morning of 7 August 1919, Parisians near the Champs-Élysées heard an engine where there should have been none. They looked up to see a Nieuport fighter dropping toward the great arch at the head of the avenue — and then, impossibly, threading...
Share this story In August 1944, as Allied armies raced across France, a 52-year-old prisoner was put aboard a transport at Drancy bound for the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Vichy regime had already jailed him, together with his wife and children. Now the Nazis...
Share this story Four minutes after lifting off from Singapore Changi Airport on 4 November 2010, Qantas Flight 32 was climbing through 7,400 feet when the passengers heard it: a bang, then a second, heavier one that shuddered through the cabin. On the flight deck,...
Share this story At noon on 18 February 1944, the guards of Amiens prison sat down to lunch, as they did every day. Outside, snow lay deep across Picardy and the sky was a low grey ceiling. Inside the cruciform building, behind a three-and-a-half-metre perimeter wall,...
Share this story On the morning of Saturday, 27 October 1962, Major Rudolf “Rudy” Anderson Jr. was sealed into his pressure suit at McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida. He was not on the schedule that day — he had lobbied hard for the mission. It would be his...
Share this story On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind...
Share this story Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them...
Share this story It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours,...
Share this story On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the...
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