Share this story Twenty Sea Harriers sailed south with the Royal Navy task force in April 1982. None of them should have survived. The Argentine Air Force outnumbered them five to one, flew faster jets, and operated from concrete runways while the British pilots...
NASA’s X-59 QueSST aircraft, the direct descendant of the SSBD programme, broke the sound barrier for the first time in June 2026 — designed to produce a gentle thump instead of a thunderclap. (NASA) If you have ever seen a photo of the Shaped Sonic Boom...
Hoy hace cincuenta años, el 1 de julio de 1976, el Museo Nacional del Aire y el Espacio del Smithsonian abrió sus puertas en el National Mall de Washington, D.C. Fue un regalo del bicentenario a una nación que acababa de llevar hombres a la Luna, ganar una carrera espacial y construir una...
Kelly Johnson diseñó el F-104 Starfighter con un único propósito: ascender rápidamente, volar a gran altitud y derribar bombarderos soviéticos antes de que llegaran a las ciudades estadounidenses. El ingeniero de Lockheed encuestó a pilotos de cazas durante la Guerra de Corea en 1951 y concluyó que lo que buscaban no era otro avión pesado...
On the afternoon of 6 April 1965, test pilot Roland “Bee” Beamont was having lunch at a pub near Boscombe Down when the BBC news bulletin came through the radio. Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan, midway through his Budget Speech in the House of...
In September 1967, an ungainly four-engine turboprop lumbered off the runway at Nha Trang Air Base in South Vietnam. It looked like any other C-130 Hercules — the workhorse cargo plane that had been hauling troops, ammunition, and jeeps across theatre since the early...
Argentina went to war in the Falklands in April 1982 with five air-launched Exocet missiles. Five. That was the entire stock — France had delivered the AM39 variant along with a handful of Super Étendard strike fighters just months before the conflict began, and the...
On the morning of April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Fighter Two airstrip on Guadalcanal and turned west over the Solomon Sea. Their mission was not to engage enemy formations or escort bombers. It was to kill one man: Admiral Isoroku...
Share this story Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune,...
Share this story Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second...
Share this story It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers...
Comparte esta historia. Es la mañana del 5 de mayo de 1945, en las laderas boscosas de la montaña Gearhart, en el sur de Oregón. El reverendo Archie Mitchell ha llevado a su esposa embarazada, Elsie, y a sus cinco hijos desde su escuela dominical para un picnic. Mientras Archie estaciona el auto, el...
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