In the summer of 1952, a machine the size of an airliner-to-come rose off the water at Cowes and thundered around the Isle of Wight. The Saunders-Roe Princess was the largest all-metal flying boat ever built, a pressurised, double-decked ocean liner of the air...
When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945, one of them...
In the late 1950s, communist East Germany set out to do something audacious: build its own jet airliner, from scratch, and beat much of the West to the punch. The result was the Baade 152 — the first jet airliner built in Germany, east or west. It flew, it...
In the 1930s the Soviet Union built an aircraft designed not to fight or to carry cargo, but to sell communism from the sky. The Tupolev ANT-20 — named the Maxim Gorky after the great Soviet writer — was the largest aircraft in the world, an eight-engine...
In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build in a garden shed...
On the evening of 10 May 1941, the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, alone, and pointed it at Scotland. No orders. No co-pilot. No authorisation from Hitler. Just Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, on a...
In 1929, at a time when most airliners carried a dozen passengers in wicker chairs, a German company built a flying boat the size of an ocean liner. The Dornier Do X had three decks, a smoking lounge with a wet bar, twelve engines mounted in a row on top of its wing...
Every list of the worst aircraft ever built has the same name near the top, and it belongs to a machine designed by a man who knew nothing about aeroplanes. Dr. William Whitney Christmas was a physician. He was also a relentless self-promoter with a single,...
It was a hard-luck bomber nobody wanted — a battered B-17E scarred by oddball accidents and passed from unit to unit until its tail number gave it a new name: Old 666. A misfit pilot named Jay Zeamer requisitioned the wreck, rebuilt it into a private gunship,...
The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery that rebuilt their...
Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for regular carrier...
In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have been sent to a...
On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.” It was a Boeing...
In 1942 America needed fighters fast, and General Motors thought it had a clever shortcut. Instead of designing a new aircraft from scratch, its Fisher Body division would bolt one together from the best bits of aircraft already in production — a wing from here,...
It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of the Second World...
Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a quirk that made it...
On the morning of 12 May 1940, five Fairey Battle bombers of No. 12 Squadron took off to destroy a bridge over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, in Belgium. German troops were pouring across it. The bridge was ringed with anti-aircraft guns and patrolled by...