Share this story The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put...
Share this story The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only...
Share this story Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if...
Share this story On November 2, 1947, the largest flying boat ever built lifted off the water of Long Beach Harbor, flew for about a mile at seventy feet, and never flew again. In that single minute, Howard Hughes won an argument that had nearly destroyed him. The...
Share this story In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a...
Share this story The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress first flew on April 15, 1952. The youngest airframe in the fleet was delivered in October 1962. Every B-52 flying today is older than every crew member flying it — and many are older than the crew members’ parents....
Share this story On February 20, 1959 — a day Canadians still call “Black Friday” — Prime Minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the most advanced interceptor on the planet, fired 14,500 people, and ordered every prototype destroyed. Then, for good measure,...
Share this story Half a century ago, the Shah of Iran bought 80 American F-14A Tomcats and 633 AIM-54 Phoenix long-range missiles for $2 billion. It was the most advanced fighter deal the United States had ever made with a foreign country.Then came the revolution, the...
Share this story Before AWACS, air warfare was a knife fight in a dark room. Pilots relied on their own radar, ground controllers with limited visibility, and radio calls that were often confused, late, or wrong. After AWACS, one side had the lights on and the other...
Share this story North Korea operates one of the largest air forces in the world on paper. The Korean People’s Army Air Force (KPAAF) fields an estimated 550–570 combat aircraft, over 300 transport and utility helicopters, and approximately 110,000 personnel. By...
Share this story The Republic XF-84H Thunderscreech is widely considered the loudest aircraft ever built. Its supersonic propeller generated continuous sonic booms that could be heard 25 miles away, made ground crews physically ill, and reportedly knocked a man...
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