Share this story On a carrier deck in the northern autumn of 1991, a fighter unlike anything in the West rose straight up on pillars of flame, rotated its tail nozzle back to level, and accelerated away past the speed of sound. This was the Yakovlev Yak-141, NATO...
Share this story Roll it out onto the sun-bleached hardpan at Muroc in 1943 and the Northrop XP-56 looked less like a fighter than a dark, headless projectile. There was almost no tail, no nose propeller, and a fat belly fin slicing the desert air. Jack Northrop...
Share this story When the Supermarine Scimitar first crashed onto a carrier deck in 1958, it arrived as the biggest, heaviest and most powerful aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had ever tried to operate from a ship. Twin Rolls-Royce Avons gave it such brutal thrust that a...
Share this story On 3 July 1955, forty-eight identical swept-wing jets thundered over Tushino airfield outside Moscow in a single roaring formation. Western observers at the airshow did the arithmetic and felt a chill: the Soviet Union had just fielded its first...
Share this story On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it...
Share this story In the autumn of 1942, the strangest fighter in America sat on a dry lakebed in the Mojave wearing a lie. Whenever the aircraft was parked in the open, ground crews bolted a dummy wooden propeller to its nose, because the machine hidden beneath the...
Share this story Most modern combat aircraft are built to avoid getting hit. The Su-25 Frogfoot was built to get hit and keep flying. Squat, blunt-nosed and wrapped in armour, the Sukhoi Su-25 — called Grach (“Rook”) by its crews and...
Share this story Ask anyone who served in Vietnam what the war sounded like, and many will give you the same answer: a rhythmic, chopping whop-whop-whop rolling in over the trees. It was the sound of the Bell UH-1 — the Huey — and depending on which end of...
Share this story It is past midnight over Saipan, the summer of 1944, and a Japanese bomber crew thinks the darkness is keeping them safe. It isn’t. Somewhere below and behind them, a big twin-boomed aircraft is sliding into position, its radar operator...
Share this story Picture a shipping container bolted to the deck of a warship, its interior glowing with the soft light of industrial 3D printers. Outside, the sea is heaving — twelve-foot waves, some of the roughest water off California in five years. Inside,...
Share this story Just after dawn on Monday, air-raid sirens and the buzz of engines reached a city most of the war had never touched. Nizhnekamsk sits roughly 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the nearest Ukrainian-held ground, deep in the Russian republic of...
Share this story When people picture wartime aircraft, they picture fighters and bombers. Almost no one pictures a helicopter — yet by 1942 Germany was flying a nimble little rotorcraft off the decks of warships, spotting submarines in the Baltic. It was the...
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