Share this story Late on the afternoon of 9 May 1943, two Spitfires of No. 165 Squadron caught an unidentified twin-engined aircraft orbiting low off the Aberdeenshire coast. As the lead pilot closed in, the stranger lowered its undercarriage, fired red flares and...
Share this story Stand at the fence at any big airport and watch a Boeing 787 taxi past. The back edge of each engine nacelle is cut into a row of neat triangular teeth, like the rim of a saw blade someone has rolled into a cylinder. Passengers assume it is styling....
Share this story In 1945 Japan’s aircraft industry was not just defeated, it was switched off. The post-war restrictions banned Japanese firms from aircraft research and from making aircraft materials and equipment. The country that had built the Zero spent the...
Share this story On Friday 14 March 2025, two elderly jet transports flew their last sortie for the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. The fitting detail was which two they were: serials 28-1001 and 28-1002, the very first Kawasaki C-1s ever built, the prototypes that had...
Share this story On 18 June 2024, at the Swedish Air Force Museum in Linköping, the Flygvapnet held a retirement ceremony for a jet that had first flown 61 years earlier. Generations of Swedish fighter pilots, from the Viggen era to the Gripen, had taken their...
Share this story On the evening of 20 November 1962, John F. Kennedy walked into a press conference with news the world had been waiting almost four weeks to hear. The Soviet missiles were already gone from Cuba. What had kept the US Navy’s blockade in place...
Share this story In the autumn of 1975 a wooden model about ten feet long sat on a pole in the New Mexico desert while a radar looked at it. The number that came back from that pole is, by a long and badly documented chain of repetition, the reason you have read that...
Share this story The air is smooth, the sky is blue, and the ridge ahead looks a comfortable few hundred feet below the nose. Then the vertical speed indicator swings past 1,000 feet per minute down, full power changes nothing, and the ridge stops looking low. No...
Share this story On 22 January 1963, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer signed the Élysée Treaty, sealing the reconciliation of two countries that had fought three wars in seventy years. Thirty-four days later, on 25 February 1963, a twin-turboprop transport rolled...
Share this story A second engine sounds like a spare. Lose one, keep flying on the other. That is the reason many pilots give for wanting a multi-engine rating, and it is only half true. On a typical light twin, losing one engine costs you half your power, and...
Share this story It is a warm, muggy summer afternoon. The outside air temperature is 25 °C, the sky is hazy, and there is not a cloud in sight, let alone a snowflake. Somewhere inside the engine of a small training aeroplane, ice is quietly growing on a metal...
Share this story Picture a Soviet bomber crossing the Arctic at night in 1955. Somewhere ahead of it, a single American pilot sits in a fighter with no guns at all. He is not looking out of the canopy. He is staring into a radar scope, steering a small dot into the...
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