Share this story On the morning of 2 September 1958, a four-engined transport drones eastward through the clear sky near the Turkish-Soviet border. To anyone who glanced up, it is just a C-130 Hercules — an unglamorous cargo hauler. It is not. Tail number 60528...
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
Share this story The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is...
Share this story On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov,...
Share this story Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle...
Share this story On 20 June 1951, over the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler did something no pilot had ever done. As his stubby little research jet, the Bell X-5, climbed away from the desert floor, he reached for a...
Share this story On the morning of 28 June 1939, twenty-two extraordinarily lucky people walked down a pier at Port Washington on Long Island and climbed aboard what looked like an ocean liner with wings. Captain R.O.D. Sullivan ran up the four big engines, and the...
Share this story It is the middle of the night somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, and a four-engine turboprop is flying low and slow above the black water. Inside, a Navy flight officer hunches over a screen, watching a pattern of floating microphones he has just...
Share this story It is just before dawn on 17 April 1944, and a sleek, triple-tailed airliner is rolling down the runway at Lockheed’s Burbank field. In the left seat, hands on the controls, sits one of the most famous men in America: Howard Hughes —...
Share this story It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the...
Share this story It looks like someone strapped wings and two open cockpits onto a beer keg and pushed it off a hill. Short, fat and hollow, the Stipa-Caproni is routinely voted one of the ugliest aircraft ever to actually fly. And yet this 1932 Italian oddity quietly...
Share this story Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes...
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