Share this story Picture a desert morning at Edwards in 1949: dust, sagebrush, and a fighter that looks like someone bolted the wings on the wrong way round. Most aircraft wings are fat where they meet the fuselage and slim to a graceful point at the tip. The Republic...
Share this story On 16 August 1960, a tiny open gondola hung beneath an enormous helium balloon, 102,800 feet above the New Mexico desert. That is more than 31 kilometres up — high enough that the sky overhead is black, the horizon curves, and there is almost no air...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the newest, fastest jets in the world kept running into an invisible wall. They would accelerate beautifully — and then, just short of the speed of sound, a surge of drag would swallow their engines’ power and stop them dead....
Share this story There are bad aircraft, and then there is the Christmas Bullet — a machine so misconceived that it holds a record no other aeroplane will ever want: it killed a test pilot on its first flight, and then killed a second test pilot on the first flight of...
Share this story It had no tail. It squatted on its undercarriage like a startled bird. It was named after a flying reptile, and in the buttoned-up world of 1930s British aviation it looked like a practical joke. The Westland-Hill Pterodactyl was none of those things....
Share this story Ask anyone to name a First World War fighter ace and you’ll hear the same handful of names: the Red Baron, perhaps Billy Bishop, maybe Albert Ball. You will almost never hear the name of the deadliest pilot the Southern Hemisphere ever produced — a...
Share this story As the Third Reich’s fortunes collapsed, its engineers reached for ever more extreme ideas. Some were genuinely brilliant. Some were merely enormous. And a few belonged squarely in science fiction. Hitler’s faith in war-winning “wonder weapons”...
Share this story Look closely at the photograph: those are two full-size 1950s automobiles, parked comfortably underneath the helicopter. Above them sits a single rotor so vast that each of its two blades weighs as much as a small car and is wide enough to walk along....
Share this story Ask almost anyone which aircraft won the Battle of Britain and you will get the same answer: the Spitfire. It is one of the most beautiful machines ever built, and it has earned its legend. But it is, at best, only half the story. The aircraft that...
Share this story In a refrigerated room hidden beneath London’s Smithfield Meat Market in 1943, behind a screen of hanging animal carcasses, a future Nobel Prize winner was busy perfecting a recipe. Not for food — for a building material. His task: prove that you...
Share this story At one minute past one in the morning on December 20, 1989, the warm tropical dark outside the Panamanian Defense Force barracks at Rio Hato was ripped apart by two enormous explosions. Soldiers tumbled from their bunks into the confusion, scanning a...
Share this story The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured...
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