Share this story Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft...
Share this story In the spring of 1942, young American pilots training in Florida had a grim joke about the sleek new bomber they were learning to fly: “one a day in Tampa Bay.” It was barely an exaggeration. The Martin B-26 Marauder was killing its own...
Share this story There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is...
Share this story Every time you settle into an airliner seat at 35,000 feet, sealed comfortably against air so thin and cold it would kill you in minutes, you are enjoying an idea that first flew on the last day of 1938. Its name was the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, and...
Share this story German fighter pilots had a name for the big four-engined British flying boat they kept meeting over the Atlantic: the Fliegendes Stachelschwein — the “flying porcupine.” They earned that respect the hard way. Attacking a lone Short...
Share this story At 7:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day 1929, a fat, three-engined Fokker lifted off from a field near Los Angeles and simply refused to come down. For the next six days, seven hours and forty minutes, it stayed in the air — sleeping,...
Share this story The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still...
Share this story On 11 June 1940, the people of Malta looked up at a sky suddenly full of Italian bombers and saw, rising to meet them, a handful of fabric-and-wire biplanes that looked like relics from the last war. They were relics. And for ten desperate days, they...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 7 told the engineering story of the B-29 — the pressurised cabin, the burning engines, the Battle of Kansas. This piece asks the question that story leaves hanging: how did America...
Share this story Picture a single dirt runway hacked out of a jungle, ringed by palm stumps and bomb craters, with a handful of battered fighters parked in the mud. Every day it was bombed. Some nights it was shelled by battleships. And from it, a scratch force of...
Share this story It had a propeller at the back, a nose that tilted up to lob its cannon shells, and a seat that dropped its pilot out through the belly in an emergency so he would not be chopped to pieces by his own engine. It was nearly as long as a DC-3. And it was...
Share this story There was a stretch of sky between India and China so lethal that the men who flew it said you could navigate by the wrecks below. They called it the Hump — and for three years, an unbroken stream of transport planes crossed the highest...
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