Share this story Head-on, the Fairey Gannet looked like something a committee had argued about and lost. A deep, humpbacked fuselage, a chin full of radar, and a nose crowded with eight spinning propeller blades stacked in two counter-rotating discs. It is one of the...
Share this story On 9 July 1961, a huge four-engined jet thundered over the Tushino airfield near Moscow, flanked by two MiG-21s. Western observers craned their necks and reached for their notebooks. Here, it seemed, was proof that the Soviet Union had built a...
Share this story From the front it looked like the future: a big, twin-boom jet with a needle nose and no visible cockpit canopy where you would expect one. The de Havilland Sea Vixen was one of the most futuristic fighters the Royal Navy ever flew. It was also one of...
Share this story On the morning of 12 August 1944, a 29-year-old naval aviator climbed into a Liberator bomber that had been stripped of its guns and filled, wingtip to wingtip, with explosives. He did not have to be there. He had flown his tour and earned his ticket...
Share this story In the 1950s the U.S. Navy watched the Air Force build a fleet of long-range bombers to carry the nation’s nuclear deterrent — and decided it wanted in. Its answer was one of the strangest and most beautiful warplanes America ever built: a...
Share this story In 1943, a 33-year-old engineer promised the US Army Air Forces a jet fighter in 180 days. He rented a circus tent, pitched it beside a foul-smelling plastics factory in Burbank, sealed off a handful of hand-picked engineers, and delivered the XP-80...
Share this story On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one...
Share this story It was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. And for thirty years, when the weather closed in and the target sat hidden under cloud and darkness that grounded everything else, the US Navy sent the Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsonic,...
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet climbed at more than 3,600 metres per minute — so fast that Allied bomber crews, seeing it for the first time in the summer of 1944, could scarcely track it. In a single breathtaking arc it could reach the bombers,...
Share this story At the height of the Battle of Britain, with his fighter pilots being blamed for the bombers falling out of the sky, a young German ace was asked by the head of the Luftwaffe what he needed to turn things around. Adolf Galland, cigar clenched in his...
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
Share this story On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell...
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