Share this story On 18 April 1949, workers at Newport News, Virginia, laid the keel of the biggest warship the US Navy had ever ordered: USS United States, a flush-decked supercarrier built to launch bombers big enough to carry atomic weapons. Five days later, the new...
Share this story Shortly after 11pm on 31 October 2000, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 lined up for take-off at Taipei in driving typhoon rain. The crew had been cleared to depart from runway 05L. They were on the wrong runway. The aircraft, flight SQ006 to Los...
Share this story Fifty-four years ago today, a twin-turboprop of the Uruguayan Air Force took off from Mendoza in Argentina with 45 people on board, bound across the Andes for Santiago. Many of them were young men from the Old Christians Club rugby team of Montevideo,...
Share this story At dawn on Sunday, 14 October 1962, a single grey reconnaissance jet crossed the Yucatán Channel at 72,500 feet and turned north towards western Cuba. Its pilot was Major Richard S. Heyser of the US Air Force. He was flying so high that he left no...
Share this story For a crippled American bomber over southern Germany in 1944, Switzerland was often the nearest safe ground. Between August 1943 and April 1945, 166 US bombers came down there. Their crews were safe from the war, but not free: under international law,...
Share this story By 1943 Allied bomber streams were pounding German cities by day and night, and the Luftwaffe’s fighters and flak could not stop them. One answer was a weapon that did not yet exist anywhere: a guided missile fired from the ground at aircraft....
Share this story In a glass case at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne sits a model of a flying boat with twelve engines mounted in pairs above its wing. The placard beside it calls the Dornier Do X the “Jumbo der 1930er-Jahre”, the jumbo of the...
Share this story In the aviation hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne hangs a bright red low-wing monoplane with white stripes and Swissair titles. The placard beneath it is headed “Faster than any Fighter-Plane”. It is the Lockheed Orion, the...
Share this story Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton was 53 years old, a navigator with a lifetime in the Air Force behind him and a love of golf. On Easter Sunday, 2 April 1972, he was also the only man to get out of an aircraft blown apart by a Soviet-made missile...
Share this story For six days in June 1995, a hunted man in Bosnia was a 29-year-old American fighter pilot lying face-down in the undergrowth. Bosnian Serb soldiers walked past him. Some fired their rifles nearby. He ate leaves, grass and insects, and squeezed...
Share this story On the morning of 5 January 1943, four Japanese dive bombers jumped an American task force off Guadalcanal. One of them hit the New Zealand cruiser Achilles, and the group broke away. As they pulled off, the gunners of the light cruiser USS Helena...
Share this story Shortly after midday on 7 May 1942, a radio crackled in the flag plot of a US carrier task force somewhere south of the Louisiade Archipelago. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, leading the dive bombers of Lexington’s Scouting...
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