Share this story On 31 December 1966 the Federal Aviation Administration chose which American company would build the aeroplane that was going to make Concorde obsolete. Lockheed lost. The reasons given were, in effect, that its aircraft was too sensible. The L-2000...
Share this story The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career. On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10...
Share this story Hawker Aircraft built the Hurricane, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Hunter and the Harrier. The name is stamped on some of the most important aeroplanes Britain ever produced. It is not the name of a British aristocrat or an engineer knighted for it....
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 On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye....
Share this story The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week,...
Share this story The Boeing 737 MAX spent almost two years grounded worldwide after two crashes killed everybody on board both aircraft. Its reputation has never entirely recovered, whatever the safety record since. The United States Air Force is going to buy one, and...
Share this story There are 96 military veterans in the United States Congress. Forty-five served in the Army, twenty-four in the Navy, twelve in the Marine Corps and fifteen in the Air Force. Of those fifteen, exactly one flew fighters. Rep. August Pfluger of Texas...
Share this story Every December, C-130Js from Yokota fly to Guam and spend a fortnight pushing bundles out of the back over the Federated States of Micronesia. Operation Christmas Drop has run for seventy-four years and reaches sixty islands. It is charming, and it is...
Share this story There were several news helicopters over Chatsworth on the evening of 15 September. A Metro bus and an SUV had collided in the west San Fernando Valley and people had died, so the aircraft that cover Los Angeles from above had gathered, as they do....
Share this story Somebody has flown every tanker the U.S. Air Force has ever operated. The new head of Air Mobility Command would like to know whether that needs to stay true. “I do not believe that it has to be a manned future air refueling solution,” Lt....
Share this story The United States fired 1,100 JASSMs at Iran in the first 39 days of the war. That is not a stockpile being drawn down. That is a stockpile being emptied. Lockheed Martin’s answer, unveiled this week, is not a better missile. It is a missile you...
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