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....
Share this story In a glass case at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne sits a model of a flying boat with twelve engines mounted in pairs above its wing. The placard beside it calls the Dornier Do X the “Jumbo der 1930er-Jahre”, the jumbo of the...
Share this story In the aviation hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne hangs a bright red low-wing monoplane with white stripes and Swissair titles. The placard beneath it is headed “Faster than any Fighter-Plane”. It is the Lockheed Orion, the...
Share this story Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton was 53 years old, a navigator with a lifetime in the Air Force behind him and a love of golf. On Easter Sunday, 2 April 1972, he was also the only man to get out of an aircraft blown apart by a Soviet-made missile...
Share this story For six days in June 1995, a hunted man in Bosnia was a 29-year-old American fighter pilot lying face-down in the undergrowth. Bosnian Serb soldiers walked past him. Some fired their rifles nearby. He ate leaves, grass and insects, and squeezed...
Share this story On the morning of 5 January 1943, four Japanese dive bombers jumped an American task force off Guadalcanal. One of them hit the New Zealand cruiser Achilles, and the group broke away. As they pulled off, the gunners of the light cruiser USS Helena...
Share this story Shortly after midday on 7 May 1942, a radio crackled in the flag plot of a US carrier task force somewhere south of the Louisiade Archipelago. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, leading the dive bombers of Lexington’s Scouting...
Share this story At 13:20 UTC on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 in Malaysia Airlines colours was cruising at 33,000 feet over the wheat fields of the Donetsk region, a little under three hours out of Amsterdam. The cockpit voice recorder was running. The crew had no...
Share this story A column of buses stops beside a bomb-damaged hangar at Gia Lam Airport, Hanoi, just after noon on 12 February 1973. Inside are 116 American prisoners of war in identical new jackets that their captors issued a few days earlier. Most of them have...
Share this story Shortly after leaving Palma de Mallorca on the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, somewhere over the south of France, a young man with a pistol walked into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 737. The holiday flight to Frankfurt was carrying 86...
Share this story Somewhere over Lebanon, a few minutes from Damascus, seven Israeli Phantoms are flying low under a grey lid of cloud. The weather was fair when they left Israel. Over the Syrian border it has closed in, with turbulence shaking the jets and the ground...
Share this story At Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida, a winging ceremony builds to one moment: family members step forward and pin a small gold badge on the chest of a newly graduated naval aviator. Years of flight training come down to that. In April 2026,...
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