Share this story Just before four o’clock on the afternoon of 23 June 1952, US Navy Skyraiders tipped into their dives over the Yalu River. Below them sat the Sui-ho Dam, one of the biggest hydroelectric plants on earth. Across the river, less than 40 miles...
Share this story On Sunday 21 October 1928, a small Waco biplane dropped down over New York’s East River and flew under the Queensboro Bridge. Then under the Williamsburg Bridge. Then the Manhattan Bridge. Then the Brooklyn Bridge. Newsreel cameras caught her at...
Share this story Seventy miles south of Hanoi, a steel bridge 540 feet long sat on a single concrete pier in the middle of the Song Ma river. It carried the only railway in the North Vietnamese panhandle, with a road lane on either side. Locals called it Ham Rong: the...
Share this story At 10:27 on the morning of 24 October 1944, eight dive bombers from the carrier USS Intrepid tipped over above the Sibuyan Sea and went for the biggest target any of their crews had ever seen. Below them steamed Musashi, one of the two heaviest...
Share this story Navy fighters are painted to disappear. VX-4’s were the exception. The Air Test and Evaluation Squadron at Point Mugu, California, flew its commander’s jet in gloss black with a white Playboy bunny on the fin, under the squadron call sign...
Share this story When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on 20 July 1969, he was 38 years old and had already survived more close calls than most pilots see in a career. Two ejections, a spacecraft tumbling out of control in orbit, and a landing that ended with the...
Share this story On 24 October 1958, a slim silver delta with tricolour roundels pushed past Mach 2 in level flight, reaching Mach 2.2. No Western European aircraft had done it before. Nine years later, the same design would win one of the most decisive air campaigns...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Share this story On 14 September 1939, two weeks after war broke out in Europe, a 50-year-old engineer in a business suit and a felt hat climbed into an open frame of steel tubes in Stratford, Connecticut. Ropes tied the machine to the ground. When Igor Sikorsky...
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, C.R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, picked up the telephone and would not put it down. On the other end was Donald Douglas, who had a perfectly good airliner, the DC-2, and no particular wish to build another. Smith...
Share this story The most successful pilot ever to fly the F-14 Tomcat never went to TOPGUN, never landed on a carrier and never fought for the U.S. Navy. He flew for Iran, against Iraq, in a war most Western readers barely remember.Jalil Zandi is credited with 11...
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