Share this story A Boeing 747 does not simply fall out of the sky. But on the night of 19 February 1985, over the Pacific, one did — rolling onto its side and plunging nearly six miles toward the ocean with 274 people aboard. That any of them lived is down to a...
Share this story Thirteen minutes after leaving Birmingham on the morning of 10 June 1990, the pilots of British Airways Flight 5390 had loosened their shoulder straps and set breakfast on their laps. Then, with a bang like a bomb, the left cockpit windscreen tore...
Share this story By 1944 the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was already one of the biggest, heaviest single-engine fighters of the war — a seven-ton brute that pilots adored. Then Republic asked a wild question: what if we made it even bigger, and bolted on the most...
Share this story Cut a hole in the side of a jumbo jet, point a two-and-a-half-metre telescope out of it, and fly the whole contraption into the stratosphere at night. It sounds like a terrible idea. For twelve years, it was one of the most productive telescopes in...
Share this story In the late 1920s, a young man named Willard Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof off a barn. The roof did not slide forward and lift like an aircraft; it simply rose straight up as the wind screamed over it. Custer had a revelation that would...
Share this story Imagine a cargo plane that works like a truck and trailer. It lands, drops off a fully loaded box, clips on an empty one, and is airborne again in minutes — while ground crews unload the box it left behind. In 1950, Fairchild actually built that...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked American industry a genuinely strange question: could a fighter take off straight up, standing on its tail, from a platform on the back of a warship? Lockheed’s answer was a stubby little aircraft that...
Share this story Long before the Predator, before the Reaper, before a single Hellfire was ever fired from an unmanned aircraft, a little jet-powered drone with a bug’s name was already flying spy missions over the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. It was...
Share this story Picture the problem. A spy is stranded on an ice floe near the top of the world, far beyond the reach of any helicopter, on ground where no aircraft can land. How do you get him home without stopping?The Cold War answer was gloriously insane: you fly...
Share this story In the first days of October 1973, Israel was losing. Egyptian and Syrian armies had struck on Yom Kippur, and Israeli tanks and aircraft were being destroyed faster than the country could replace them. Then, out of the western sky, came the sound of...
Share this story It is white, it is enormous, and it is faster than almost anything with a bomb bay. Russian crews call the Tupolev Tu-160 the “White Swan” for its pale anti-flash paint and its improbably graceful lines. The rest of the world knows it by...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada desert on a July morning in 1957, five American officers stood in the open, looked straight up, and waited for a nuclear weapon to go off directly above their heads. There was no bunker. There was no lead shielding. There was...
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