Share this story The fuel gauge read empty when the runway at Udorn, just across the Mekong in Thailand, came up in front of the nose. Maj. Leo Thorsness had pulled his F-105F back to idle with 70 miles to go, by his own account, and glided in. In the back seat, his...
Share this story The float was a few bamboo logs, and the man clinging to it had a right arm broken in three places, bare feet cut to ribbons and branches heaped over him for cover. He was crossing the Ben Hai, the river that divided North from South Vietnam. A sentry...
Share this story It is Thursday, so we did something we rarely do: we went back through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and read our own old websites. The oldest copy of migflug.com it holds dates from February 2005. Its page title was “MiG Flights...
Share this story The Lockheed U-2 was built around one idea: fly high enough and nobody can touch you. At 70,000 feet in the mid-1950s, that was true. No Soviet fighter could climb that high and stay there, and the first generation of Soviet missiles could not reach...
Share this story The bomb was supposed to fall away into the sky. Instead it came back up the chute and hit Staff Sergeant Henry Erwin in the face, burning at around 1,300°F (about 700°C). Within seconds he was blind, his clothes were on fire, and thick white...
Share this story On the night of 3 January 2026, the first helicopter into one of the most sensitive raids in recent American history was an Army MH-47 Chinook flown by Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. Minutes later he had four bullets in his leg. Seven weeks...
Share this story Some aces are remembered for their kills. Hubert Zemke is remembered for his pilots. As commander of the US Eighth Air Force’s 56th Fighter Group, he turned a unit of eager young P-47 Thunderbolt pilots into Zemke’s Wolf Pack, one of the...
Share this story At a quarter past three on the afternoon of 14 October 1973, Egyptian radar operators in the Nile Delta watched a formation of Israeli jets sweep in from the Mediterranean near Port Said. Over the next 53 minutes, the sky above the Delta filled with...
Share this story It has no fuselage, no fin and no tailplane, and it looks like something from the 1980s rather than 1945. The Horten Ho 229 is one of the most photographed German aircraft of the Second World War, and it is usually described as the world’s first...
Share this story At 10:12 on the morning of 28 December 1944, a Japanese A6M Zero dived through anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the Liberty ship SS John Burke in the Mindanao Sea. For a few seconds there was only smoke. Then her cargo of ammunition went up, and...
Share this story At 9:14 on the morning of 12 November 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 lifted off from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport bound for Santo Domingo. Many of the 251 passengers were Dominican New Yorkers going home. About 105 seconds later the...
Share this story At 15:45 on Tuesday, 2 October 2001, Swissair chairman and CEO Mario Corti stood in front of the cameras and announced that the airline would stop flying. By then, jets carrying the Swiss cross were already sitting on aprons from Zurich to New York,...
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