En septembre 1939, la Pologne entra en guerre aérienne avec des chasseurs à ailes de mouette, vestiges d'une autre époque. Pourtant, dans un hangar d'Okęcie se trouvait l'appareil qui allait tout changer : le PZL.50 Jastrząb – le Faucon – un avion élégant, moderne et entièrement métallique….
Au premier coup d'œil, on pourrait le confondre avec un Sabre. Mais en y regardant de plus près, les différences s'accumulent : un fuselage plus épais, un train d'atterrissage à roues jumelées, un canon dans le nez et, plus étrange encore, aucune entrée d'air à l'avant. Il s'agissait du North American YF-93, un chasseur conçu pour….
It looked like nothing else in the sky: a stubby twin-engine fighter whose nose stopped dead at the wing, as if someone had sawn the front off a normal aeroplane. Test pilots loved it. Comic-book readers worshipped it. And the U.S. Navy, after flying it against the...
On 26 August 2026, seven Sikorsky S-70i Black Hawks were blessed and formally handed over at Villamor Air Base in Pasay City. With that quiet ceremony, the Philippine Air Force closed out one of the most consequential procurement runs in its history — and became...
The most advanced fighter America builds has a decidedly un-glamorous problem: it runs too hot. Every new sensor, jammer and processor bolted into the F-35 Lightning II throws off heat the jet was never designed to shed — and the fix has become a two-company...
A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 on final approach to Cologne/Bonn came uncomfortably close to a drone earlier this year. This week, the consequences arrived: Germany’s air-navigation authority has rewritten how the airport’s runways are used whenever the military...
Sweden has decided that its most modern transport helicopter is not worth keeping. From 2027, the Swedish Armed Forces will begin retiring nine NH90 battlefield transports — barely a decade after the last of them was delivered — and lean instead on a...
She was instructing over Oahu on 7 December 1941 when the first wave arrived, and was shot at twice before nine in the morning. Fifteen months later she was dead in a Texas canyon.
Two rotors side by side, sixty-seven metres across the tips, and forty tonnes lifted to 2,255 metres in 1969. No helicopter has lifted more since. Only two were ever built.
A Pearl 15 ran a full simulated flight cycle on pure hydrogen at NASA Stennis. It is a real milestone — and it was a ground rig burning gas, not an aircraft burning liquid.
Five engines, four of which only pushed downwards, and a triplex electronic control system that voted with itself. The SC.1 worked out how to hover a jet more than a decade before the Harrier entered RAF service.
She soloed at twelve, won three aerobatic championships cutting ribbons upside down, then set a land speed record in a jet car. Seventeen records across air and land.
A jet flying wing built to chase laminar flow, and the day in May 1949 when it shook itself apart and made Jo Lancaster the first British pilot to eject in an emergency.
In 1960 a Soviet airliner derived from the Tu-95 bomber averaged 877 km/h over 5,000 km. No propeller-driven aircraft has beaten it since.
The first operational aircraft with ejection seats, fast enough to catch a Mosquito, and cancelled by a field marshal who disliked its designer. Only one complete example survives.
In 1964 an Ohio pilot flew an eleven-year-old Cessna 180 around the world alone in 29 days. The press called her a housewife. She had eight years and an instrument rating behind her.
Fifty years after its first flight, the Aermacchi MB-339 has trained 2,500 Italian pilots, attacked a Royal Navy frigate, and still flies with the Frecce Tricolori.