Look at the belly of the aircraft below. There is a cockpit on it. No glass, no pilot, no hole in the airframe. It is paint. A Royal Canadian Air Force CF-188 Hornet from below. The dark shape behind the radome is not a window. It is paint. Photo: Bernardo Fernandez...
Somewhere over Africa this spring, a four-engine turboprop that first flew in 1954 rolled its ramp open and pushed a missile out the back. The missile fell clear, unfolded its wings, lit a small turbojet and flew away. Minutes later it was several hundred miles...
On the night of 16 December 1943, Bomber Command came home to an England that had disappeared. Radiation fog had closed almost every airfield in the east. Crews who had survived Berlin circled above a white nothing until their tanks ran dry. At RAF Bourn alone,...
On 6 September 1948, John Derry became the first Briton to fly faster than sound, in a de Havilland DH.108. Four years later to the day, on 6 September 1952, he was killed at Farnborough in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand people, along with his flight test...
The most uncomfortable finding of the whole Ramstein investigation is also the simplest. Nobody broke a rule. The trinational safety commission concluded that the display complied with STANAG 3533, the NATO standard then governing flying displays, and that the...
The certified maximum capacity of a Boeing 747-200 in the densest airline layout ever offered was somewhere around 550 seats. On 24 May 1991, an El Al 747 freighter left Addis Ababa carrying, by the Guinness World Records figure, 1,088 people. Two of them were born...
About six kilometres from McMurdo Station, under a shifting crust of snow on the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a Lockheed Super Constellation. It has been there since 8 October 1970. Nobody died in the accident that put it there, nobody ever came to take it away, and the...
On 23 December 1942 a very large four-engined aeroplane with a glazed nose and twin fins lifted off from Augsburg. It had bunk beds in the fuselage and a galley with hot plates, because the flight it was designed for would take the best part of a day. The destination...
For two years, between 1956 and 1958, exactly one jet airliner was carrying fare-paying passengers anywhere in the world. The Comets were grounded. The 707 had not arrived. The Caravelle was not in service. The aircraft holding that title was a Soviet bomber with a...
The Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant could carry an 88 mm gun and its tractor, or a medium tank, or two hundred equipped soldiers. Its cargo hold was deliberately sized to match a German railway flatcar, so that anything which could travel by rail could be flown instead....
On the morning of 21 August 1976, B-52s flew in from Guam with Phantom escorts. F-111s crossed the Pacific from Idaho. Fighters launched from Kadena, Clark, Osan and Taegu. South Korean F-5s and Sabres joined the stack. An aircraft carrier task force took station off...
A submarine on the surface can see about five nautical miles. That is not a technology problem, it is a geometry problem: the lookout’s eyes are roughly five metres above the water and the earth curves away beneath him. The German admiralty considered several...
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