Share this story Three were built. Three flew. One crashed. Two went into storage. None ever entered service. The Lockheed YF-12 is one of those aircraft that should have rewritten the book on continental air defence and instead became a footnote — overshadowed by the...
Share this story On 10 January 1964, a B-52H Stratofortress flown by a Boeing test crew on a structural test flight near East Spanish Peak in southern Colorado when it flew into the worst clear-air turbulence anyone aboard had ever experienced. There was no warning,...
On 1 November 1950, UN pilots over North Korea encountered something they had not expected: a swept-wing jet fighter faster, more agile, and better armed than anything in their inventory. The MiG-15 appeared above the Yalu River — the border between North Korea and...
Share this story It was the fastest fighter at low level in the Royal Air Force inventory, faster than the Spitfire below 15,000 feet. It carried four 20mm cannons in its nose — twice the firepower of any other British fighter. It first flew in October 1938 and...
Share this story The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts the twin-section Allison turboprop driving its 16-foot...
Share this story Glue two P-51 Mustangs together along the wing. Share a tailplane between them. Put the radio operator’s seat in the right fuselage. Tell the pilot in the left fuselage to fly the aircraft. The result is the F-82 Twin Mustang — the longest-range...
Share this story Atlas Air is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 747 freighters. The carrier flies more 747-8Fs and 747-400s than any other airline on Earth. The 747 is, in many ways, the brand. So when Atlas walks into Toulouse and signs a $7-billion order...
Share this story The aircraft is the size of a Cessna 172 but flies itself. There is no pilot. There is no cockpit. There is no second seat for an emergency manual override. Pyka’s Pelican Cargo just took off, flew a 200-kilometre route over central California,...
Share this story The General Electric J85 first ran on a test stand in 1956. Eisenhower was president. The Soviets had not yet launched Sputnik. Seventy years later, the same engine — virtually unchanged in its core architecture — is being kept alive by more than $178...
He had been awake for 23 hours before he even took off. Charles Lindbergh spent the night of 19 May 1927 in a hotel near Roosevelt Field, Long Island, unable to sleep, while rain hammered the airfield and weather reports from the Atlantic were ambiguous at best. At...
Every military pilot flying today sits on a device that can blast them out of a crippled aircraft in a fraction of a second. From the moment of handle pull to full parachute deployment takes less than two seconds. The seat fires its occupant at up to 20g and 600 mph...
Share this story Of all the strange aircraft the United States built during the Second World War — and there were many — none was stranger, on paper or in person, than the Northrop XP-79. The XP-79 has gone down in history as a manned missile. Its mission, so the...
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