Share this story The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery...
Share this story Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for...
Share this story In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have...
Share this story On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.”...
Share this story It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of...
Share this story Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a...
Share this story In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind...
Share this story It was nearly 27 metres of gleaming Soviet ambition — a needle-nosed, missile-armed interceptor built to swat American bombers out of the stratosphere. On 16 July 1956 the Lavochkin La-250 lifted off for the first time, rolled uncontrollably,...
Share this story In September 1939, Poland went to war in the air flying gull-winged fighters that belonged to another decade. Yet in a hangar at Okęcie sat the aircraft that was supposed to change all that: the PZL.50 Jastrząb — the Hawk — a sleek,...
Share this story Look quickly and you might call it a Sabre. Look again and the differences pile up: a fatter fuselage, twin-wheel landing gear, cannon in the nose, and — strangest of all — no air intake at the front. This was the North American YF-93, a...
Share this story It looked like nothing else in the sky: a stubby twin-engine fighter whose nose stopped dead at the wing, as if someone had sawn the front off a normal aeroplane. Test pilots loved it. Comic-book readers worshipped it. And the U.S. Navy, after flying...
Share this story Just before eight on the morning of 7 December 1941, Cornelia Fort was doing touch-and-goes over Oahu with a student. She was 22, a civilian flight instructor with the Andrew Flying Service, and she was in an Interstate Cadet — a 65-horsepower...
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