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,...
Share this story It looked like the future: a long, polished needle of a fuselage, four jet engines tucked into two slim nacelles, and a tandem bubble canopy perched on top. On 2 April 1947, the Convair XB-46 took off from San Diego and flew for 90 minutes to Muroc...
Share this story On 7 July 1962, Georgy Mosolov flew a sleek Soviet delta-winged jet down a measured course twice, once in each direction, and averaged 2,681 kilometres per hour. That made it the fastest aircraft in the world. The paperwork sent to the Fédération...
Share this story In January 1956, Kelly Johnson walked into the Pentagon with an offer the Air Force could not refuse. The man who had just built the U-2 proposed a successor that would cruise at Mach 2.5 and nearly 100,000 feet, and he promised the first of two...
Share this story On 10 February 1906, King Edward VII smashed a bottle against the bow of a new battleship at Portsmouth. A year after work on her began, HMS Dreadnought went to sea for trials, and every other battleship in the world, including all of Britain’s...
Share this story It had no wings worth the name, no engine running at touchdown and only one chance to get it right. On 5 August 1975, NASA test pilot John Manke brought the X-24B lifting body down from 60,000 feet without power and landed it on the concrete main...
Share this story On 12 December 1953, Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1A to Mach 2.44, faster than any human had flown. Seconds later the rocket plane went completely out of control. It rolled, yawed and tumbled end over end, slamming Yeager’s helmet into the...
Share this story Off the coast of southern California on 16 November 2004, a NASA B-52B released a rocket with a strange, flat, surfboard-shaped object bolted to its nose. The Pegasus booster lit, climbed to about 110,000 feet and let go. For roughly ten seconds, the...
Recent Comments