Share this story On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then...
Le document le plus important de l'histoire des avions furtifs n'a pas été rédigé en Californie ni sur un aérodrome secret en plein désert. Il a été écrit à Moscou, en russe, par un physicien soviétique – et l'Union soviétique a autorisé sa diffusion à l'étranger car elle estimait que ce travail était sans intérêt….
Regardez le flanc du navire et vous le verrez : le fantôme d'un avion. Deux ailes, un fuselage, même les jambes d'un train d'atterrissage fixe — la silhouette grandeur nature d'un appareil, imprimée sur l'acier gris de la marine. C'est l'une des photographies les plus étranges et les plus troublantes...
Dans l'histoire des avions de chasse, on oublie presque toujours le finaliste. L'appareil qui perd la compétition se voit attribuer une plaque commémorative dans un musée, s'il a de la chance, tandis que le vainqueur obtient la production en série. Le Northrop YF-17 Cobra est la grande exception. Il a perdu – et pourtant….
Il y a les gros avions, et puis il y avait le Mriya. Se tenir sous un Boeing 747, c'est se sentir petit. Se tenir sous un An-225, c'est le 747 qui paraît minuscule. Pendant 33 ans, un seul exemplaire de cette machine a existé : un géant soviétique à six moteurs conçu pour un seul avion….
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter...
Share this story In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico...
Share this story On a May morning in 1957, over the Pacific near Christmas Island, a Vickers Valiant called XD818 opened its bomb bay and released a device that fell away, dropped for long seconds, and then turned the sky white. Britain had just become a thermonuclear...
Share this story Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined...
Share this story In March 2026, a silver jet with a wickedly swept wing thundered down a runway near Houston and hauled itself into the Texas sky. It was a North American F-100 Super Sabre — one of only two left flying anywhere on earth — and its return is a good...
Share this story In the late 1930s, Bell Aircraft set out to build a fighter so ambitious that it needed gunners riding inside the engines. The result, the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda, was sleek, futuristic, bristling with cannon — and one of the most gloriously misguided...
Share this story France, the late 1950s. At SNECMA, engineers were building an aircraft with no wings you would recognise — no long span, no tail as anyone knew it, just a jet engine wrapped inside a great metal ring, designed to stand on its tail and rise straight...
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