Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the...
Partagez cette histoire : Frank Kendall, qui a été secrétaire à l’Air Force des États-Unis de juillet 2021 à janvier 2025, a passé trois jours début septembre 2026 à développer le même argument à trois reprises : dans une tribune publiée dans le New York Times le 1er septembre, dans une interview….
Share this story When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open...
Partagez cette histoire. Le 2 juin 1944, des B-17 de la Quinzième Air Force bombardèrent des gares de triage en Hongrie, puis poursuivirent leur route vers l'est. Ils atterrirent en Ukraine, sur trois aérodromes soviétiques que l'Armée rouge avait remis aux Américains. C'était la première fois de la guerre que….
Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
Share this story Ask anyone which airliner first broke the sound barrier and they will say Concorde. They will be wrong by seven years — and by one very ordinary-looking Douglas jetliner that most people have completely forgotten. On 21 August 1961, a standard Douglas...
Partagez cette histoire. À l'automne 1980, des ingénieurs américains ont fixé trente roquettes sur un C-130 Hercules. Le plan était à la fois insensé et d'un sérieux implacable : faire atterrir le quadriréacteur dans un stade de football au cœur de Téhéran, l'immobiliser à l'intérieur du terrain, charger….
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a quiet man in a business suit walked up to the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. A few hours later he would step out of...
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