Share this story Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States stopped treating air power as something the Army did on the side. On 18 September 1947 the National Security Act came into force and the United States Air Force became a service in its own right, with...
Share this story In March 1942, while the United States was still flying propeller fighters and would be for the rest of the war, Lockheed handed the Army Air Forces a proposal for a twin-engined jet with a canard foreplane, a blended wing and body, and a predicted...
Share this story On 18 November 1947 a test pilot took off from San Diego in a car with an aeroplane bolted to the roof, and discovered somewhere over the mud flats that he had almost no aviation fuel on board. He had checked the fuel gauge before departure. It was...
Share this story On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about,...
Share this story The object was less than a millimetre long on the print. It sat on a photograph of a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, among thousands of other specks, and a woman in a Buckinghamshire country house looked at it through a magnifying glass and worked out...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story On 31 December 1966 the Federal Aviation Administration chose which American company would build the aeroplane that was going to make Concorde obsolete. Lockheed lost. The reasons given were, in effect, that its aircraft was too sensible. The L-2000...
Share this story The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career. On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10...
Share this story Hawker Aircraft built the Hurricane, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Hunter and the Harrier. The name is stamped on some of the most important aeroplanes Britain ever produced. It is not the name of a British aristocrat or an engineer knighted for it....
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye....
Share this story The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week,...
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