Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
Share this story Leading Aircraftman Leonard Fuller was 22 years old, three months into flight training, and had just been landed on by another aeroplane. Not hit. Landed on. The Avro Anson underneath him had driven its gun turret into his port wing root and stuck...
Share this story The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany...
Share this story Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a...
Share this story In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is...
Share this story In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would...
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
Share this story Here is a puzzle. A modern fighter jet is designed to fly something like 8,000 hours before its airframe is worn out. And yet, across NATO, air forces routinely retire their fighters long before they reach that limit — parking perfectly flyable...
Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
Condividi questa storia Nel 1943, qualcuno alla Saunders-Roe guardò la vasta distesa vuota e priva di aeroporti del Pacifico e ebbe un'idea gloriosamente controcorrente: e se il tuo caccia non avesse bisogno di una pista? E se atterrasse direttamente sul mare? Il risultato fu l'SR.A/1...
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