Share this story This week a team of archaeologists, divers and Purdue University representatives went ashore on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in Kiribati, to look at a shape in a lagoon. If they are lucky, it is the wreck of the most famous lost aeroplane in...
Share this story At around three o’clock on the afternoon of 26 January 1942, a formation of open-cockpit biplanes flew north up the coast of Malaya towards a Japanese landing at Endau. They were Vickers Vildebeests, torpedo bombers designed in the 1920s, with a...
Share this story Imagine running an air force whose newest bomber is faster than every fighter you own. That was the problem facing the Royal Air Force at the start of the 1930s, and the aircraft that caused it was a sleek silver biplane from Sydney Camm’s...
Share this story On 12 April 1940, two young trainee pilots took a Royal New Zealand Air Force biplane up over the Southern Alps for a climb to altitude. Somewhere near Mount White, the Fairey Gordon spun, recovered, and then flew into the trees on a ridge. It flipped...
Share this story Barnes Wallis is remembered for the bouncing bomb. In the decade after the war he worked on something stranger: an aircraft with no tail at all, steered only by moving its wings. The Vickers Swallow was meant to fly from Britain to Australia without...
Share this story On the final day of America’s last Mercury mission, the spacecraft’s brain went dark. One by one, the systems that were supposed to steer Faith 7 home failed. Gordon Cooper, alone in a capsule barely bigger than a telephone box, lined it...
Share this story On 18 April 1949, workers at Newport News, Virginia, laid the keel of the biggest warship the US Navy had ever ordered: USS United States, a flush-decked supercarrier built to launch bombers big enough to carry atomic weapons. Five days later, the new...
Share this story Shortly after 11pm on 31 October 2000, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 lined up for take-off at Taipei in driving typhoon rain. The crew had been cleared to depart from runway 05L. They were on the wrong runway. The aircraft, flight SQ006 to Los...
Share this story Fifty-four years ago today, a twin-turboprop of the Uruguayan Air Force took off from Mendoza in Argentina with 45 people on board, bound across the Andes for Santiago. Many of them were young men from the Old Christians Club rugby team of Montevideo,...
Share this story At dawn on Sunday, 14 October 1962, a single grey reconnaissance jet crossed the Yucatán Channel at 72,500 feet and turned north towards western Cuba. Its pilot was Major Richard S. Heyser of the US Air Force. He was flying so high that he left no...
Share this story For a crippled American bomber over southern Germany in 1944, Switzerland was often the nearest safe ground. Between August 1943 and April 1945, 166 US bombers came down there. Their crews were safe from the war, but not free: under international law,...
Share this story By 1943 Allied bomber streams were pounding German cities by day and night, and the Luftwaffe’s fighters and flak could not stop them. One answer was a weapon that did not yet exist anywhere: a guided missile fired from the ground at aircraft....
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