Every swing-wing jet that followed — the F-14 Tomcat, the F-111, the Tornado, the B-1 — owes a debt to one small, awkward and rather dangerous research aircraft from the early 1950s. The Bell X-5 was the first aeroplane in the world that could change the...
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 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...
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...
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...
In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind the Ta 183, the...
For much of two days, Kyiv did not get the all-clear. Ukrainian officials say air-raid alerts sounded almost continuously from midnight on August 27 until midday on August 29 — roughly 28 hours — as Russia rolled wave after wave of drones and missiles at...
Russia’s aircraft industry has settled into a wartime rhythm, and on 27 August 2026 it produced another familiar bulletin. The United Aircraft Corporation announced that a fresh batch of Su-35S fighters had been handed to the Russian Aerospace Forces — how...
A Czech startup that has spent the better part of a decade quietly flying odd-looking prototypes just showed its hand. On 27 August 2026, Prague-based Zuri unveiled its first commercial product: an uncrewed cargo tiltrotor built to lift a couple of hundred kilograms...
Three days after United rolled out ten new international destinations, American Airlines answered on August 27 with a transatlantic land-grab of its own: seven new international routes for summer 2027, three of them to cities American has never served. The headline is...
On the afternoon of August 28, five grey shapes dropped out of the Atlantic murk and settled onto the runway at Łask, in central Poland. Tail numbers 3512, 3513, 3514, 3515 and 3516. With their wheels down, Poland’s fleet of fifth-generation fighters had just...