Share this story The biggest aircraft the Axis powers ever built was not a bomber or a transport — it was a flying boat the size of a small ship, hauled into the air on six engines by a company that normally built ocean liners. And when an American fighter pilot...
Share this story Imagine buying an airline ticket and being shown not to a seat in the fuselage, but into the wing itself — a little cabin built into the leading edge, with a big curved window giving you the pilot’s own view of the world rushing toward...
Share this story On 17 May 1935, the man who would later write The Little Prince climbed aboard the largest aircraft on Earth. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Moscow reporting for a French newspaper, was the only foreigner allowed onto the Tupolev ANT-20 “Maxim...
Share this story It looked like a four-poster bed welded out of scaffolding, and it flew by balancing on a column of jet blast. When the Rolls-Royce Thrust Measuring Rig lurched into the air at Hucknall in 1954, it became the first jet-lift aircraft to fly anywhere in...
Share this story Take a V-1 flying bomb — the pilotless cruise missile that terrorised London in 1944 — and cut a small hole in the fuselage just ahead of the engine. Fit a plywood seat, a single control column, and a handful of basic instruments. Now put...
Share this story Somewhere over Germany in the last winter of the war, four P-51 Mustangs slid in behind a lone, unfamiliar fighter and prepared to pounce. The pilot did not turn to dogfight. He pushed the throttle to the stop, triggered a chemical boost that shoved...
Share this story On 30 April 1958, a gleaming four-engined jet was rolled out of a hangar in Dresden to great fanfare. It was called the 152, and it was meant to announce East Germany’s arrival as a builder of modern airliners — a socialist answer to the...
Share this story In the early 1960s, two American giants owned the jet age: Boeing’s 707 and the Douglas DC-8. Convair, a division of General Dynamics, decided it could not out-size them — so it tried to out-run them.The result was the Convair 990...
Share this story Doug White was having the worst week of his life. He, his wife Terri and their two daughters were flying home to Louisiana from Florida, where they had just buried his brother. It was Easter Sunday, 2009. White, a 56-year-old private pilot who had...
Share this story At 08:47 on the morning of 27 December 1991, a nearly new SAS MD-81 lifted off from a frozen Stockholm-Arlanda. It had sat out the night in near-freezing air with cold fuel chilling its wings, and a layer of clear ice — invisible, glass-smooth...
Partagez cette histoire. En 1942, Eddie Rickenbacker avait déjà échappé à la mort plus de fois que la plupart des hommes ne le font. Il était l'“ As des as ” américain de la Première Guerre mondiale, un ancien pilote des 500 Miles d'Indianapolis et le patron autoritaire d'Eastern Air Lines. Il….
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 May 1988, a nearly new Boeing 737-300 was threading between thunderstorm cells on approach to New Orleans. In the left seat sat Captain Carlos Dárdano — twenty-nine years old, and flying with one eye, the other lost...
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