Share this story On April Fools’ Day 2001, seventy miles off China’s Hainan Island, a Chinese fighter pilot misjudged his third close pass at an American spy plane by a few feet — and nearly started a war. The collision sheared his J-8 interceptor in...
Share this story On 7 August 1942, over an island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in...
Share this story On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 280 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic...
Share this story Just after eight on the morning of 29 April 1975, American Radio Service in Saigon interrupted its programming to announce that the temperature was “105 degrees and rising.” Then it played White Christmas. In a city where it never snows,...
Share this story Saturday morning, 28 July 1945. New York is wrapped in fog so thick that the top third of the Empire State Building has simply vanished. At 9:40 a.m., office workers on the 79th floor hear a sound no office worker should ever hear: aircraft engines,...
Share this story On the morning of 16 August 1966, an Iraqi Air Force captain named Munir Redfa strapped into his MiG-21F-13 for what his squadron believed was a routine long-range training sortie. He had full fuel tanks — a privilege he had rarely been granted...
Share this story For three decades during the Cold War, Britain’s nuclear deterrent rested on the wings of three extraordinary aircraft: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan, and the Handley Page Victor. Known collectively as the V-bombers, they were designed to...
Share this story The Handley Page Victor was the last and most advanced of Britain’s three V-bombers — and the one with the longest career. Designed to carry nuclear weapons to Moscow at high altitude, it outlived its original mission by decades, reinventing...
Share this story With 36,183 examples built, the Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik is the most-produced military aircraft in history — and arguably the most important ground-attack platform of the Second World War. Soviet infantry called it “the flying tank.” German...
Share this story For more than half a century, the Boeing 747 was the largest and most recognisable commercial aircraft on Earth. From its first flight in 1969 to its final delivery in January 2023, the “Queen of the Skies” carried billions of passengers,...
Share this story The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was never the fastest, highest-climbing, or most manoeuvrable fighter of the Second World War. What it was, in every theatre from North Africa to China to the Aleutians, was available — and in the hands of pilots who...
Share this story The Convair B-58 Hustler was the world’s first operational supersonic bomber — a Mach 2 delta-wing marvel that could outrun every interceptor of its era. It was also one of the most dangerous aircraft in the United States Air Force inventory,...
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