Share this story Look closely below the cockpit of a fighter coming home from a war and you may see a neat row of small symbols: flags, stars, roundels, and lately the silhouettes of drones. Each one is a claim. This jet, and its crew, shot something down. Kill...
Share this story By February 1944 the Allies had a deadline. The invasion of France was coming in the summer, and it could not succeed with the Luftwaffe still able to contest the skies over the beaches. The German fighter force had to be broken first. The weather...
Share this story Picture a bomber crew in 1942, briefed to hit a Japanese-held island far out along the chain. The target will probably be under cloud. The base they return to may be under fog by then. The wind on the runway could go from calm to hurricane force in...
Share this story On 1 July 1915, near Lunéville in eastern France, a young German lieutenant in a small monoplane closed on a French Morane-Saulnier parasol and did something no fighter pilot had yet done successfully in combat. He aimed his whole aircraft at...
Share this story Picture the job description. You sit strapped into a fighter perched on a rail over the bow of a cargo ship, somewhere in the North Atlantic. When an enemy bomber appears, rockets fire you off the front of the ship. You fight. And then, because there...
Share this story Early on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, two Israeli F-4E Phantoms sat on alert at Ofira, the air base at Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. The sirens went off. The controller did not scramble them. On the radar screens, a formation...
Share this story From the air, the patch of green on Akutan Island looked perfect: flat, grassy, a gift for a pilot with a dying engine. Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga lowered his wheels and set up to land. The grass was hiding water. The moment his main gear touched,...
Share this story Watch a B-52 land in a strong crosswind and it looks like something has gone badly wrong. The bomber comes down the approach pointing well off to one side of the runway, touches down still pointing that way, and rolls out with its nose aimed at the...
Share this story On 2 September 1944, a 20-year-old US Navy pilot named George Herbert Walker Bush flew his TBM Avenger into the flak over Chichijima, a small Japanese-held island in the Bonin chain north of Iwo Jima. His target was the island’s radio station....
Share this story On Thursday 7 September 1944, Duncan Sandys, the British minister in charge of countering Germany’s secret weapons, told the press that the flying-bomb threat to London was essentially finished. “Except possibly for a few last shots, the...
Share this story This month the Australian Army is saying goodbye to its Tiger attack helicopters. The 1st Aviation Regiment has flown its last operational Tiger flight in Darwin, and the fleet of 22 Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters, which ABC News says cost A$1.1...
Share this story On 10 September 2026, a grey helicopter with tail number 27045 landed at Moffett Air National Guard Base in California for the last time. It was the final operational HH-60G Pave Hawk in the US Air Force, and with it ended more than four decades of...
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