Share this story In the last week of January 1991, American AWACS crews over the Gulf watched something nobody had predicted. Iraqi jets were taking off, staying low and running hard, not towards the coalition and not towards friendly Jordan, but east, towards Iran....
Share this story On 10 January 1956, ground crews in Turkey and West Germany let go of the first nine of hundreds of giant plastic balloons. Each one carried a camera gondola about the size of a refrigerator. The cover story said they were studying the weather. In...
Share this story On 14 April 1956, three silver jets climbed out of Thule, Greenland, and turned towards the top of the world. Their pilots were heading for Noril’sk, a closed Soviet nickel-mining city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Two air refuellings...
Share this story Four hundred feet above a moonlit field in occupied France, a bomber painted glossy black slows to just above stalling speed. Below, three flashlights in a row and a fourth at a right angle mark the spot. In the belly, a man in a padded jump suit sits...
Share this story Just before four o’clock on the afternoon of 23 June 1952, US Navy Skyraiders tipped into their dives over the Yalu River. Below them sat the Sui-ho Dam, one of the biggest hydroelectric plants on earth. Across the river, less than 40 miles...
Share this story Seventy miles south of Hanoi, a steel bridge 540 feet long sat on a single concrete pier in the middle of the Song Ma river. It carried the only railway in the North Vietnamese panhandle, with a road lane on either side. Locals called it Ham Rong: the...
Share this story At 10:27 on the morning of 24 October 1944, eight dive bombers from the carrier USS Intrepid tipped over above the Sibuyan Sea and went for the biggest target any of their crews had ever seen. Below them steamed Musashi, one of the two heaviest...
Share this story After the hottest summer Britain has ever recorded, the government has decided that some wildfires are simply out of reach for firefighters on foot. Its answer is in the hangars of the Royal Air Force: the twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook and the A400M Atlas...
Share this story For more than three decades, every Predator, Reaper and Gray Eagle that General Atomics sold was built by General Atomics. On Friday the company broke that habit for its most important new aircraft. The fuselage of the FQ-42 Vengeance, the US Air...
Share this story On Tuesday evening, somewhere over France and the Mediterranean, French two-seat Rafale B jets flew a mock nuclear strike with something they had never had before: British fighters guarding their flanks. The escorts were Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4s of...
Share this story On 24 October 1958, a slim silver delta with tricolour roundels pushed past Mach 2 in level flight, reaching Mach 2.2. No Western European aircraft had done it before. Nine years later, the same design would win one of the most decisive air campaigns...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
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