Share this story In 1943, a 33-year-old engineer promised the US Army Air Forces a jet fighter in 180 days. He rented a circus tent, pitched it beside a foul-smelling plastics factory in Burbank, sealed off a handful of hand-picked engineers, and delivered the XP-80...
Share this story On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one...
Share this story It was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. And for thirty years, when the weather closed in and the target sat hidden under cloud and darkness that grounded everything else, the US Navy sent the Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsonic,...
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet climbed at more than 3,600 metres per minute — so fast that Allied bomber crews, seeing it for the first time in the summer of 1944, could scarcely track it. In a single breathtaking arc it could reach the bombers,...
Share this story At the height of the Battle of Britain, with his fighter pilots being blamed for the bombers falling out of the sky, a young German ace was asked by the head of the Luftwaffe what he needed to turn things around. Adolf Galland, cigar clenched in his...
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
Share this story On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell...
Share this story There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes...
Share this story At 5:55 on the evening of Friday 4 October 1918, a small biplane with cardboard wings and a papier-mâché body lifted off a wheeled dolly running down a portable track near Dayton, Ohio. There was nobody aboard and nobody controlling it. It was...
Share this story The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human’s for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first. The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a...
Share this story On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed...
Share this story It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers...
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