Share this story On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found...
Share this story Most warplanes of the 1950s are museum pieces or scrap. The Xian H-6 is neither. Nearly seventy years after its Soviet ancestor first flew, China is still building, flying, and continually re-arming this jet — and the latest versions are among...
Share this story Two fighters close head-on at a combined speed near 1,000 knots. For a heartbeat they flash past each other, close enough for the pilots to see helmets in the other cockpit. Then the real fight begins. That instant has a name: the merge. What a pilot...
Share this story She was the best-known aviator in Nazi Germany, and one of the most gifted test pilots of her era — a small, intense woman who flew rocket planes, the first practical helicopter, and a piloted version of the V-1 flying bomb. She was also a...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force wanted a single machine that could climb fast, find a Soviet bomber on its own radar, and kill it with a bay full of missiles before it reached an American city. The answer was the F-102 Delta Dagger — the...
Share this story In 1949 the Swedish Air Force asked for something that did not exist anywhere in the world: an interceptor capable of Mach 1.4 to 1.5, able to operate from dispersed road bases, to meet a Soviet bomber threat crossing the Baltic.Saab’s answer...
Share this story There is an aeroplane in the Cold War Gallery at Dayton that the museum has deliberately not restored. Its wings are off. Its nose is crushed. The paint is scorched.The Lockheed XF-90 lost its competition, never entered production, and was officially...
Share this story In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and...
Share this story The most famous three minutes in aviation cinema are a flat spin. An F-14 departs, settles into a flat rotation, and the crew ejects into the canopy.The remarkable thing about that scene is not the drama. It is that the US Navy’s own flight...
Share this story On 21 June 2013, a yacht called Eolus struck a sperm whale roughly 1,200 kilometres south-east of Miyagi prefecture and began to sink. Two men took to a life raft: a Japanese newscaster and a blind sailor attempting to cross the Pacific.A US-2...
Share this story At Nellis Air Force Base in the late 1950s, an instructor kept a standing bet with anyone who wanted it. Take up a position on his tail, the classic winning position in air combat. He would be reversed and behind you inside forty seconds, or he would...
Share this story Every pilot has felt it. The aeroplane is descending toward the runway, the flare begins, and somewhere in the last few feet the whole machine seems to change its mind about landing. It floats. It sits there, refusing to settle, eating runway.The...
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