Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story A fighter lands, taxis clear, and stops. The canopy stays down. The pilot stays strapped in. The engine keeps running at idle while somebody walks a live fuel hose up to the aircraft and plugs it into a jet that is, by any normal safety standard, an...
Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one. It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the...
Share this story In 1952 a group of scientists at MIT was asked a straightforward question: how vulnerable are the United States and Canada to aerial bombing? Their answer was that a line of search radars should be built across the Arctic, as rapidly as possible. Two...
Share this story Put a Global Hawk and a Triton side by side and most people would call it the same aeroplane. Same enormous wing, same whale-shaped fuselage, same V-tail, same manufacturer. They are not the same aeroplane, and the difference comes down to one...
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Share this story You have heard the claim. The A-10’s gun is so powerful that firing it stops the aeroplane in mid-air. It does not. A burst costs the aircraft a few miles an hour in level flight. But the claim keeps circulating because the real numbers are almost as...
Share this story The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September. There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown...
Share this story The line abreast loop is not a difficult manoeuvre for four good pilots. You climb several thousand feet side by side, pull over the top in a slow inside loop, and come down the back of it at over four hundred miles an hour. Then you level off at...
Share this story Spangdahlem sits on a hilltop in the Eifel, thirty kilometres north of Trier, in country that is green and quiet and mostly sheep. It exists because in 1951 somebody drew a line at the Rhine and decided that American fighters needed to be west of it....
Share this story There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way...
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