Share this story It could out-climb an F-16, scramble from cold to airborne in under half a minute, and fire a radar missile years before its rival could. It was cheap to run, brilliant to fly, and paid for entirely out of one company’s own pocket. And it sold exactly...
Share this story Before there was radar, before there were reliable instruments, before anyone had crossed the United States without landing, there was a quiet Army lieutenant named John Macready — a man who spent the early 1920s collecting aviation...
Share this story At a thousand feet over Wiltshire, pulling out of a vertical dive at five times the force of gravity, Neil Williams heard a bang and felt the airframe lurch. His left wing had begun to fold up. In the next few seconds, the British aerobatic champion...
Share this story Before the Spitfire, before the Battle of Britain, there was a series of air races over water — gaudy, dangerous, and watched by hundreds of thousands. The Schneider Trophy looked like pure spectacle. In fact, it was quietly forging the engine...
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a quiet man in a business suit walked up to the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. A few hours later he would step out of...
Share this story It was a calm, clear night over the Indian Ocean on 24 June 1982 when the passengers of British Airways Flight 9 noticed something strange: a glow along the wings, and puffs of smoke curling into the cabin that smelled of sulphur. Up front, the crew...
Share this story A German fighter pilot once emptied his guns into an American P-47, then pulled up alongside to watch it fall out of the sky. It did not fall. Baffled, he flew wing-to-wing with the shredded aircraft, stared at the damage, shook his head, and peeled...
Share this story In 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, the de Havilland company was quietly building a bomber the Air Ministry had not asked for and did not want — and it was making it out of wood. Officials scoffed. Within two years, that wooden aeroplane...
Share this story At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a Scottish teenager was taken flying by a First World War fighter ace. As they landed, the German told the boy two things: learn to fly, and learn German. The boy did both — and grew up to fly more different aircraft...
Share this story In the film Captain America, the villain escapes aboard a sleek, tailless flying wing. It looks like science fiction. It is not entirely invented: the design is lifted almost directly from a real German aircraft that flew in the last winter of the...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its...
Share this story On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within...
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