Share this story The de Havilland Comet was beautiful. Sleek, four-engined, impossibly quiet compared to the propliners it replaced. On 2 May 1952, BOAC Comet G-ALYP departed London for Johannesburg — the world’s first scheduled jet airline service. Passengers...
Share this story When Captain Jack Donovan was briefed on the mission — fly in the back seat of an F-100, home in on a North Vietnamese SAM site, and destroy it before it destroys you — his response entered aviation legend: “You want me to fly in the back of a...
Share this story When the US Navy bet its future on the all-missile F-4 Phantom, one aircraft refused to play along. The Vought F-8 Crusader kept its four 20mm cannons when every other fighter in the fleet was stripping theirs out. In Vietnam, it proved the...
Share this story On 9 June 1982, the Israeli Air Force destroyed 17 of 19 Syrian SAM batteries in the Bekaa Valley in a single afternoon. It lost zero aircraft doing it. In the three days of air combat that followed, Israeli F-15s and F-16s shot down 82 Syrian MiGs —...
Share this story It is January 1921, and a crowd has gathered on the shore of Lago Maggiore near Sesto Calende. They are staring at a houseboat. Or a cathedral. Or perhaps a floating lumber yard that has sprouted wings — nine of them — and eight bellowing American...
Share this story The deck crew on USS Hancock froze as the Cutlass approached from astern, its twin vertical fins silhouetted against a Pacific sunset in the summer of 1955. Lieutenant Commander Jay Alkire lined up his approach, but the underpowered Westinghouse...
Share this story Two hours into a surveillance mission over Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Kevin Henry felt it begin. A tingling in his joints. A creeping confusion behind his eyes. Then the nausea hit — sudden, violent, disorienting. At 70,000 feet in a Lockheed U-2 Dragon...
Share this story Imagine strapping yourself to a platform no larger than a manhole cover, powered by counter-rotating helicopter blades spinning beneath your feet, with nothing between you and the ground but air and optimism. Now imagine the U.S. Army telling you that...
Share this story The model sat in a cavernous hangar in Seattle, gleaming under fluorescent lights like a promise made in aluminum. It was 1969, and Boeing had built a full-sized mockup of the 2707 — America’s supersonic transport, 306 feet long, with a drooped...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada desert in the spring of 1966, a shape detached itself from the back of what appeared to be an impossibly stretched SR-71 Blackbird. For a fraction of a second, the shape hung in the slipstream like a remora leaving a shark —...
Share this story Six miles above Budapest the air was forty degrees below zero, and the sky around the Flying Fortress named Mizpah had turned into a wall of black smoke and orange fire. It was 14 July 1944, and the flak over the Hungarian capital was the kind of fire...
It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
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