Share this story It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that “best” is four or five different questions...
Share this story Inside the glider, in the dark, the tank crew sat in their tank with the engine running. The exhaust was ducted out through the side of the aircraft. When the glider stopped moving, the driver pulled a lanyard to release the shackles and drove...
Share this story Every flying boat is a compromise between two incompatible shapes. To get off the water you want a deep hull, to keep the propellers clear of spray, and a wing sitting at a high angle so it will unstick. To fly efficiently you want neither of those...
Share this story Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they...
Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Partagez cette histoire. Regardez un Blohm & Voss BV 141 de face et votre cerveau proteste. Le moteur et l'empennage sont à gauche. L'équipage est installé dans une nacelle vitrée à droite. Il n'y a pas de fuselage au milieu, car il n'y a pas de milieu. On dirait deux appareils différents….
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Partagez cette histoire. Le 2 juin 1944, des B-17 de la Quinzième Air Force bombardèrent des gares de triage en Hongrie, puis poursuivirent leur route vers l'est. Ils atterrirent en Ukraine, sur trois aérodromes soviétiques que l'Armée rouge avait remis aux Américains. C'était la première fois de la guerre que….
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
Share this story Iraq already flies the Bell 407. On 31 August 2026 the U.S. State Department cleared it to buy a great many more of them, along with a bigger stablemate and enough guns, rockets and sensors to turn utility helicopters into armed scouts. The approval,...
Share this story Egypt was the first country outside France to buy the Rafale. Eleven years later, it may be about to become the type’s biggest foreign customer by a wide margin. On 2 September 2026 the French daily La Tribune reported that Cairo has submitted a...
Share this story The treeline is close enough to count individual trees. The horizon sits high in the windscreen, the ground blurring past in green streaks, and somewhere ahead a small jet-powered cruise missile is running for a Ukrainian city at roughly the speed of...
Recent Comments