Share this story At ten past six on the evening of 24 June 1940, east of Valence, Adjudant Jean Marchelidon spotted a lone aircraft flying up the Rhône. It fired at him, he saw black crosses, and after four passes a Henschel Hs 126 went down. France’s war...
Share this story The setting was pure theatre. In the hangar of HMS Prince of Wales, in Oslo for the International Sea Power Conference, the First Sea Lord shared the stage with a scale model of an American drone wingman. In the audience sat navy chiefs from across...
Share this story In the spring of 1943, American B-24 Liberators flying over Naples met a fighter few Allied crews had seen before. It was small, slim and dark, with a long nose, a curved wing and a big triangular fin. It climbed well, it turned hard, and it attacked...
Share this story Around noon on 11 November 1940, Sergente Pilota Pietro Salvadori climbed out over the Belgian coast in an open-cockpit biplane. He was 23, flying with the Italian air corps sent to help the Luftwaffe against Britain, and his formation was heading for...
Share this story In the early hours of 1 September 1939, German bombs fell on Kraków. At a hidden airfield at Balice, just west of the city, two pilots of the 121st Fighter Escadrille ran to their aircraft: Captain Mieczysław Medwecki and Second Lieutenant...
Share this story On 22 August 2021, a team of red-and-white jets flew its last public display over Poland. The PZL TS-11 Iskra had trained Polish military pilots for more than half a century, and the Biało-Czerwone Iskry, the “White-and-Red Sparks”,...
Share this story On 21 April 1940, at the French test centre at Orléans-Bricy, a slim French fighter went up against a captured Messerschmitt Bf 109E. The German machine was faster in a straight line. But in a turning fight, the French aircraft could stay with...
Share this story In 1989, Belgium disbanded the squadron that had guarded its skies with Nike-Hercules missiles. On Monday 9 November 2026, 37 years later, it took two big steps to rebuild ground-based air defence within a single morning. Rheinmetall announced a...
Share this story Look at a Nord Noratlas from below and it hardly seems like one aeroplane. A fat, rounded cargo pod hangs from a long, straight wing. Two slender booms run back from the engines to a pair of tail fins joined by a tailplane. Between the booms, where...
Share this story In March 1945, Marcel Bloch came home from Buchenwald. Before the war he had been one of France’s leading aircraft builders; now his country had missed the entire first chapter of the jet age. He took a new surname, Dassault, from his...
Share this story On 1 August 1957, a swept-wing twin-jet in French Air Force markings touched down in Israel after a secret ferry flight routed through French bases in Tunisia. Nobody announced it. A year later, at an air display in August 1958, the Israeli public...
Share this story Look out of the window on a short regional hop in Europe, Asia or Canada and there is a good chance you will see a propeller turning just a few metres away. If you do, it almost certainly belongs to one of two aircraft: the Franco-Italian ATR 72 or...
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