Share this story The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most expensive single weapons programme of the Second World War. It cost more than the Manhattan Project. Its development consumed three billion dollars of 1944 money — call it sixty billion today — and produced...
Australia has opened the Southern Hemisphere’s first deep maintenance facility for the Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, marking a significant expansion of the nation’s self-reliance in sustaining one of the Western world’s most...
Share this story It looks like a shipping container. The kind you see stacked on cargo ships, sitting in port yards, or riding the back of a flatbed truck. Twenty feet long, corrugated steel, anonymous. You could drive past a thousand of them without a second glance....
Share this story On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed one of the two aircraft at the heart of a pioneering German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal...
Share this story For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters...
Share this story On 4 September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft ever built in Britain took off on its maiden flight from Filton, near Bristol. It had a wingspan of 70 metres — longer than a Boeing 747’s. Eight engines, buried in the wings in pairs,...
Share this story In the 1960s, American spy satellites scanning the Caspian Sea brought back pictures of something that should not have existed: a 92-metre, jet-powered hybrid of ship and aircraft, skimming the water at 500 km/h. The CIA called it the Caspian Sea...
Share this story The Bell AH-1 Cobra is the most consequential helicopter design in American military history. Before the Cobra, every armed helicopter in the world was a transport airframe with weapons bolted onto it — a Huey with door guns, a Mi-4 with rocket pods,...
Share this story When two aircraft collide in mid-air — as happened recently with an EA-18G Growler at Mountain Home Air Force Base — the debris field can stretch for miles. Pieces of aluminum, wiring, and avionics scatter across terrain in patterns that look random...
Share this story Most people assume that becoming a pilot requires good eyesight and a steady hand. That much is true. What most people don’t realize is just how deep the medical rabbit hole goes — and how some of the conditions that can ground you are genuinely...
Share this story The North American XB-70 Valkyrie was supposed to be the future of strategic bombing — a six-engine colossus that could outrun anything in the sky at three times the speed of sound. Instead, it became one of aviation’s most expensive...
Share this story The most ambitious naval aviation concept the United States ever fielded was not the nuclear-powered supercarrier. It was a 785-foot helium airship with an interior hangar bay full of biplane fighters that could be launched and recovered in flight....
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