Share this story On 12 December 1953, Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1A to Mach 2.44, faster than any human had flown. Seconds later the rocket plane went completely out of control. It rolled, yawed and tumbled end over end, slamming Yeager’s helmet into the...
Share this story Off the coast of southern California on 16 November 2004, a NASA B-52B released a rocket with a strange, flat, surfboard-shaped object bolted to its nose. The Pegasus booster lit, climbed to about 110,000 feet and let go. For roughly ten seconds, the...
Share this story In September 1969, three Lockheed engineers put their names to a report with a dry title: A Study of Very Large Nuclear-Powered Aircraft in a Potential Mission Application. Inside was one of the largest flying machines ever drawn. Its wings would have...
Share this story A fighter pilot’s own eyes, and even his own radar, only see a small piece of the sky. Somewhere on the ground, a controller in a dark room sees much more. Ground-controlled interception, or GCI, is the system that joins the two: radar stations...
Share this story On 24 September 1929, Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle climbed into the rear cockpit of a biplane at Mitchel Field on Long Island, and somebody pulled a canvas hood over his head. From that moment he could see nothing outside. He could see only a handful of...
Share this story In the middle of the night, halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco, the Boeing Stratocruiser Clipper Sovereign of the Skies lost two of its four engines. It was too far from land to make it either way. So for hours, its crew flew circles in the...
Share this story Today the Indian Air Force flies Rafales, Su-30MKIs and Tejas fighters and is one of the largest air forces in the world. On Thursday it turns 94. Its first combat unit was four fabric-covered biplanes and a handful of young pilots on an airfield...
Share this story At two o’clock in the afternoon on 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the sky over the Suez Canal filled with Egyptian jets. More than 200 of them crossed the canal at low level and fanned out across the Sinai,...
Share this story On New Year’s Eve 1934, engineers in the machine laboratory of ETH Zurich switched on a new wind tunnel for the first time. Next door stood something even more unusual: a tunnel built to blow air past models at twice the speed of sound, in a...
Share this story Shortly after takeoff from RAAF Base Amberley on 18 July 2006, the crew of an Australian F-111 heard something no F-111 crew in Australia had heard in thirty years. The control tower was on the radio: their left main wheel had just fallen off. What...
Share this story Twenty-five years ago this Wednesday, on the night of 7 October 2001, the first bombs of the war in Afghanistan began to fall. Some of them had been carried by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers that had flown all the way from Missouri, aircraft that would...
Share this story The old cargo plane was down to about 2,500 feet over the Nicaraguan jungle on 5 October 1986, lining up to drop its load, when a teenage Sandinista soldier raised a Soviet-made SA-7 missile launcher to his shoulder and fired. The missile hit the...
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