In the 1930s the Soviet Union built an aircraft designed not to fight or to carry cargo, but to sell communism from the sky. The Tupolev ANT-20 — named the Maxim Gorky after the great Soviet writer — was the largest aircraft in the world, an eight-engine...
In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build in a garden shed...
On the evening of 10 May 1941, the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, alone, and pointed it at Scotland. No orders. No co-pilot. No authorisation from Hitler. Just Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, on a...
In 1929, at a time when most airliners carried a dozen passengers in wicker chairs, a German company built a flying boat the size of an ocean liner. The Dornier Do X had three decks, a smoking lounge with a wet bar, twelve engines mounted in a row on top of its wing...
Every list of the worst aircraft ever built has the same name near the top, and it belongs to a machine designed by a man who knew nothing about aeroplanes. Dr. William Whitney Christmas was a physician. He was also a relentless self-promoter with a single,...
It was a hard-luck bomber nobody wanted — a battered B-17E scarred by oddball accidents and passed from unit to unit until its tail number gave it a new name: Old 666. A misfit pilot named Jay Zeamer requisitioned the wreck, rebuilt it into a private gunship,...
The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery that rebuilt their...
Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for regular carrier...
In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have been sent to a...
On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.” It was a Boeing...
In 1942 America needed fighters fast, and General Motors thought it had a clever shortcut. Instead of designing a new aircraft from scratch, its Fisher Body division would bolt one together from the best bits of aircraft already in production — a wing from here,...
It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of the Second World...
Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a quirk that made it...
On the morning of 12 May 1940, five Fairey Battle bombers of No. 12 Squadron took off to destroy a bridge over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, in Belgium. German troops were pouring across it. The bridge was ringed with anti-aircraft guns and patrolled by...
Most fighters are born as one thing and die as one thing. The Saab 21 is the rare aircraft that lived two lives — first with a piston engine and a propeller mounted behind the pilot, then with that whole tail-end torn out and a jet engine bolted in its place. It...
In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind the Ta 183, the...
For much of two days, Kyiv did not get the all-clear. Ukrainian officials say air-raid alerts sounded almost continuously from midnight on August 27 until midday on August 29 — roughly 28 hours — as Russia rolled wave after wave of drones and missiles at...