Share this story Part 7 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. The Manhattan Project cost 1.9 billion dollars. The aircraft built to deliver its product cost three billion. This is the engineering story of the B-29 Superfortress — bought off the...
Share this story Part 4 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Fission was discovered in Berlin. So why did the bomb come from New Mexico? This part examines the German and Japanese programs — and the errors, raids and illusions that stopped them. The...
Share this story In the mid-1950s, Britain faced a nightmare: waves of Soviet bombers climbing ever higher and flying ever faster, each one potentially carrying an atomic bomb. Conventional fighters simply could not climb quickly enough to catch them in time. So...
Share this story Every fighter ever built was designed to fight — to turn, climb, chase and dodge. The Douglas F6D Missileer was designed to do none of those things. It was, quite deliberately, a fighter built never to dogfight: a big, slow, straight-winged...
Share this story When the United States cancelled its X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane in 1963, the idea did not die. It moved east. In the design bureau of Artem Mikoyan, Soviet engineers set out to build their own winged spacecraft — one that would ride a rocket...
Share this story It was fat, slow, and so unlovely that the men who flew it simply called it “the Whale.” It set no speed records and never graced a recruiting poster. And yet the Douglas F3D Skyknight did something no glamorous day-fighter could claim: on...
Share this story Almost everyone can tell you that Chuck Yeager was first to break the sound barrier. Far fewer can name the man who first flew at twice the speed of sound. He was Scott Crossfield, and he did it on November 20, 1953, in a sleek, snow-white rocket...
Share this story For thirty-five summers, one of the most beloved sounds over the Swiss Alps was the deep, uneven drone of three radial engines and the sight of a corrugated metal skin catching the light. It was the Junkers Ju 52 — “Tante Ju,” Auntie...
Share this story Chinese state television does not show its most sensitive hardware by accident. So when the final episode of the CCTV documentary Zhisheng (“Victory”) aired on August 4, 2026, one sequence was clearly meant to be seen: an H-6N bomber...
Share this story The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy...
Share this story The biggest aircraft the Axis powers ever built was not a bomber or a transport — it was a flying boat the size of a small ship, hauled into the air on six engines by a company that normally built ocean liners. And when an American fighter pilot...
Share this story On 30 April 1958, a gleaming four-engined jet was rolled out of a hangar in Dresden to great fanfare. It was called the 152, and it was meant to announce East Germany’s arrival as a builder of modern airliners — a socialist answer to the...
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