Share this story In 1969 the Chinese air force asked for a fighter small enough to be carried on the back of a truck. The idea was that in a war on Chinese soil, airfields would be bombed flat within days. What survived would be whatever could be hidden, dispersed and...
Share this story On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast...
Share this story Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets. Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets...
Share this story In 1965 the Republic of China Air Force built two graves at the Bitan military cemetery outside Taipei. One was for Major Yeh Changti, the other for Major Chang Liyi. Both men had been shot down over communist China. Both had been declared dead. The...
Share this story On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished. Seventeen men had been on...
Share this story On 4 December 1956, an Italian test pilot pointed a small silver aeroplane downhill from above 40,000 feet and became the first man to take an Italian-designed, Italian-built aircraft through the sound barrier. The aircraft was the Aerfer Sagittario...
Share this story On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as...
Share this story In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it. Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for...
Share this story In the summer of 1986 the largest aircraft in the world sat on a ramp at Lakehurst, New Jersey, three quarters of a mile from where the Hindenburg had burned. It was 343 feet long. It was a Navy blimp with four helicopters bolted underneath it. On 1...
Share this story On 24 November 1961, a machine that looked like somebody had bolted two helicopters to the wingtips of a transport aircraft lifted 16.4 tonnes to two and a half kilometres, set six world records in one flight, and landed thirty minutes later with its...
Share this story Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the...
Share this story The most important document in this story is a memo. It was written on 27 June 1972 by an engineer named Dan Applegate, it ran to a few pages, and it said clearly what was going to happen. Twenty months later it happened. Three hundred and forty-six...
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