Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye....
Share this story The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week,...
Share this story Somewhere over the North Atlantic, in late 1973 or early 1974, a US Air Force F-4C Phantom flew a barrel roll around a Soviet Tu-95 Bear. The Soviet crew had asked for it, by hand signal, through the glass. The photographs were taken by Robert M....
Share this story On 4 November 1977 the United Nations Security Council voted 15 to nothing to impose a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa. It was the first time the Council had ever imposed binding sanctions on a member state. Nine years later South Africa rolled...
Share this story On 16 December 1966 the United Nations Security Council imposed the first mandatory arms embargo in its history. The target was Rhodesia, which had declared independence from Britain thirteen months earlier and which no country on earth recognised....
Share this story Air France 4590 lifted off from runway 26 Right at Charles de Gaulle at 16:43 on Tuesday 25 July 2000, already on fire, and hit a hotel at Gonesse about seventy seconds later. Everyone aboard died — 100 passengers and nine crew — along...
Share this story On 10 February 1995, over a stretch of Amazon jungle that neither country could reach easily on foot, four Ecuadorian fighters shot down three Peruvian aircraft in about fifteen minutes. The Cenepa air battle is the only time an IAI Kfir has scored an...
Share this story Britain spent the 1950s building three superb bombers and then discovered it had nothing worth putting in them. The Vulcan, the Victor and the Valiant were designed to fly over the Soviet Union and drop free-fall bombs. By the time they were in...
Share this story On 5 December 1956 the United States Air Force launched a nuclear-capable cruise missile from Cape Canaveral, sent it towards Puerto Rico, and then lost it. Not lost as in crashed. Lost as in it kept flying, ignored every command including the...
Share this story The Su-27 and the MiG-29 were designed in the same country, in the same decade, against the same American threat. They were never supposed to meet. They met exactly once, in February 1999, over a stretch of scrub on the border between Ethiopia and...
Share this story The helicopters had American flags painted on the fuel tanks, on both cabin doors, on the nose and on the belly. It was a clear spring morning in northern Iraq with good visibility. The lead F-15 pilot passed 1,000 feet to their left and 500 feet...
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