Todos los aviones a reacción de ala de geometría variable que le siguieron —el F-14 Tomcat, el F-111, el Tornado, el B-1— le deben mucho a un pequeño, torpe y bastante peligroso avión de investigación de principios de la década de 1950. El Bell X-5 fue el primer avión del mundo capaz de cambiar...
Cuando la gente imagina los primeros helicópteros prácticos, suele pensar en Igor Sikorsky y en Estados Unidos durante la guerra. Pero años antes de que las máquinas de Sikorsky alcanzaran su madurez, la Alemania nazi construyó un helicóptero de transporte realmente útil, y en septiembre de 1945, uno de ellos...
A mediados de la década de 1930, el sueño de un carpintero francés puso la aviación al alcance del ciudadano común. La Pulga Voladora de Henri Mignet —el Pou-du-Ciel, o “Piojo del Cielo”— era un diminuto avión de madera que cualquiera podía construir en un cobertizo de jardín...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Russia’s aircraft industry has settled into a wartime rhythm, and on 27 August 2026 it produced another familiar bulletin. The United Aircraft Corporation announced that a fresh batch of Su-35S fighters had been handed to the Russian Aerospace Forces — how...
Una empresa emergente checa que ha pasado la mayor parte de una década volando discretamente prototipos de aspecto peculiar, finalmente reveló sus cartas. El 27 de agosto de 2026, Zuri, con sede en Praga, presentó su primer producto comercial: un helicóptero de carga no tripulado con rotor basculante diseñado para levantar un par de cientos de kilogramos...
Tres días después de que United anunciara diez nuevos destinos internacionales, American Airlines respondió el 27 de agosto con su propia ofensiva transatlántica: siete nuevas rutas internacionales para el verano de 2027, tres de ellas a ciudades a las que American nunca ha volado. El titular es...
On the afternoon of August 28, five grey shapes dropped out of the Atlantic murk and settled onto the runway at Łask, in central Poland. Tail numbers 3512, 3513, 3514, 3515 and 3516. With their wheels down, Poland’s fleet of fifth-generation fighters had just...