Share this story On a French airfield in 1916, you might have found two lion cubs named Whiskey and Soda padding between the tents, and a group of young Americans who had crossed an ocean to fight a war their own country had not yet joined. This was the Escadrille...
Share this story By the summer of 1944, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous pilot alive and one of the most controversial men in America. He had crossed the Atlantic alone in 1927 and been adored for it. Then he had campaigned to keep the United States out of the...
Share this story On the morning of December 8, 1941, the same Japanese offensive that had just shattered Pearl Harbor reached a speck of coral 2,000 miles to the west. Wake Island was barely three low islets around a lagoon — a refuelling stop with an airstrip,...
Share this story You could identify it from the ground before you could hear it: two long booms, a pod slung between them, and a wing that seemed to float without a fuselage behind it. Nothing else in the sky of 1942 looked remotely like the P-38 Lightning —...
Share this story Its own crews called it “the Beast.” Less politely, they said the letters SB2C stood for “Son of a Bitch, 2nd Class.” An MIT professor who studied a model of it in a wind tunnel declared that anyone who built more than one...
Share this story On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all...
Share this story Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with...
Share this story Every test pilot who flew it seemed to reach for superlatives. One of the greatest aviators of the century called it outstanding. Another, a man who would later fly jets to the edge of control, called it simply the best aircraft he had ever flown. The...
Share this story When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name...
Share this story The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy...
Share this story Of all the strange machines the Second World War produced, few are as gloriously, defiantly odd as the one a British engineer built in 1942: an ordinary army Jeep, bolted to a spinning rotor, meant to be towed into the sky behind a bomber and flown...
Share this story By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down...
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