Share this story For forty years, aviation enthusiasts have chased a ghost. It has a name, a rumored shape, and a trail of strange evidence. What it does not have is a single confirmed photograph, a serial number, or an admission that it was ever built. The ghost is...
Share this story In the darkest years of the Cold War, American engineers designed a weapon so appalling that many of the people building it were relieved when it was cancelled. It was a cruise missile with an unshielded nuclear reactor for an engine, and it was meant...
Share this story On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it...
Share this story In the autumn of 1942, the strangest fighter in America sat on a dry lakebed in the Mojave wearing a lie. Whenever the aircraft was parked in the open, ground crews bolted a dummy wooden propeller to its nose, because the machine hidden beneath the...
Share this story Most modern combat aircraft are built to avoid getting hit. The Su-25 Frogfoot was built to get hit and keep flying. Squat, blunt-nosed and wrapped in armour, the Sukhoi Su-25 — called Grach (“Rook”) by its crews and...
Share this story Ask anyone who served in Vietnam what the war sounded like, and many will give you the same answer: a rhythmic, chopping whop-whop-whop rolling in over the trees. It was the sound of the Bell UH-1 — the Huey — and depending on which end of...
Share this story It is past midnight over Saipan, the summer of 1944, and a Japanese bomber crew thinks the darkness is keeping them safe. It isn’t. Somewhere below and behind them, a big twin-boomed aircraft is sliding into position, its radar operator...
Share this story On a brilliantly clear March morning in 1966, a BOAC Boeing 707 lifted off from Tokyo bound for Hong Kong, and its crew did something generous and entirely human: they turned toward Mount Fuji so their passengers could photograph Japan’s perfect...
Share this story When people picture wartime aircraft, they picture fighters and bombers. Almost no one pictures a helicopter — yet by 1942 Germany was flying a nimble little rotorcraft off the decks of warships, spotting submarines in the Baltic. It was the...
Share this story It was three days after Christmas, 1972. A brand-new Lockheed L-1011 TriStar was on final approach to Miami with 176 people aboard when a tiny green light — the one confirming the nose landing gear was down and locked — failed to come on....
Share this story On a clear night in April 1979, a Boeing 727 cruising at 39,000 feet over Michigan suddenly rolled onto its back and fell out of the sky, spinning through two complete rolls as it plunged toward the ground. Sixty-three seconds later it had dropped...
Share this story On the Fourth of July 1989, two American F-15 pilots on alert in the Netherlands were scrambled to intercept an intruder crossing into NATO airspace. What they found was a real Soviet fighter, deep over Western Europe — with no one flying it.It...
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