Share this story At 3:58 on the afternoon of 29 May 1951, a red P-51 Mustang lifted off from Bardufoss in northern Norway with one man in it and no radio navigation aids ahead of him worth the name. Charles Blair was going to fly over the North Pole to Alaska, alone,...
Share this story On 10 June 1965, a British airliner full of fare-paying passengers came down the approach to a runway and landed without either pilot touching the controls. It was the first automatic landing by a civil airliner in scheduled passenger service, and it...
Share this story Between May and August 1972, an F-4 Phantom pilot from Reidsville, North Carolina was credited with shooting down five MiG-21s over North Vietnam. Every one fell to the AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided missile with a reputation so poor that crews joked...
Share this story At 4:17 in the afternoon on 4 April 1977, a first officer named Lyman Keele said nine words into a cockpit voice recorder that would be played back for decades afterwards. “Bill, you’ve got to find me a highway.” His DC-9 had no...
Share this story At 3:48 in the afternoon on 20 October 1986, two minutes from touchdown at Kuibyshev, the captain of a Soviet airliner asked his flight engineer to pull the curtains across the cockpit windows. The Tupolev Tu-134 had them fitted for training: draw...
Share this story On a spring morning at Bordeaux-Mérignac in 1971, a sleek twin-jet lifted off carrying the hopes of the French aircraft industry. Marcel Dassault had built fighters that governments queued up for. Now he was going after Boeing, on...
Share this story In the early 1950s, neutral Sweden set out to build a supersonic interceptor unlike anything else in the world — a fighter with a strange, folded ‘double-delta’ wing. It was such a radical idea that no one could be sure the shape...
Share this story When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51...
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell F3H Demon is remembered for what it led to. Underpowered, dangerous in its early years, and saddled with one of the worst engines in naval-aviation history, the Demon nonetheless taught its...
Share this story Before he was a reclusive billionaire, before the movies and the mania, Howard Hughes was a young man obsessed with going fast. In 1935 that obsession took the shape of a single, gorgeous silver aeroplane — the Hughes H-1 Racer — and with...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Share this story On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found...
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