Share this story Tens of thousands of Axis prisoners spent the Second World War behind Allied wire. Exactly one of them broke out, crossed an ocean, and made it all the way back to his own side to fly again. His name was Franz von Werra, and the film they made about...
Share this story By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other...
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air...
Share this story In December 1941, a German engineer handed the Reich Air Ministry a several-hundred-page report describing a way to bomb New York from the edge of space. The weapon would be launched off a two-mile rail, rocket to the fringe of the atmosphere at some...
Share this story Head-on, the Fairey Gannet looked like something a committee had argued about and lost. A deep, humpbacked fuselage, a chin full of radar, and a nose crowded with eight spinning propeller blades stacked in two counter-rotating discs. It is one of the...
Share this story On 9 July 1961, a huge four-engined jet thundered over the Tushino airfield near Moscow, flanked by two MiG-21s. Western observers craned their necks and reached for their notebooks. Here, it seemed, was proof that the Soviet Union had built a...
Share this story From the front it looked like the future: a big, twin-boom jet with a needle nose and no visible cockpit canopy where you would expect one. The de Havilland Sea Vixen was one of the most futuristic fighters the Royal Navy ever flew. It was also one of...
Share this story On the morning of 12 August 1944, a 29-year-old naval aviator climbed into a Liberator bomber that had been stripped of its guns and filled, wingtip to wingtip, with explosives. He did not have to be there. He had flown his tour and earned his ticket...
Share this story In the 1950s the U.S. Navy watched the Air Force build a fleet of long-range bombers to carry the nation’s nuclear deterrent — and decided it wanted in. Its answer was one of the strangest and most beautiful warplanes America ever built: a...
Share this story It is named after a sound. The BRRRRT Act — yes, really — is Congress’s latest attempt to keep the A-10 Thunderbolt II flying, and it wants more of the jets in the air than the Air Force is willing to keep. Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.)...
Share this story A Russian fifth-generation fighter came down west of Moscow on 23 July. The pilot ejected and survived; the aircraft did not. Russian media identified the jet as a Sukhoi Su-57, the country’s newest stealth fighter. The Defence Ministry confirmed that...
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
Recent Comments