Share this story Franz Stigler had one kill to go. One more aircraft, and he would earn the Knight’s Cross — the highest military honour the Luftwaffe could bestow. He had fought across North Africa and was now flying Bf 109s over Germany, defending the Reich...
Share this story In the summer of 1951, American F-86A pilots over North Korea were dying. Not because the MiG-15 was faster. Not because the North Korean and Chinese pilots were better. They were dying because at around Mach 0.86 — the speed at which the...
Share this story Thirteen miles above Southern California, moving at roughly a mile every two seconds, Major Brian Shul and his backseat reconnaissance officer Walt were monitoring Los Angeles Center radio traffic when the entertainment started. A Cessna pilot had...
Share this story At 7:33 in the morning on June 10, 1990, British Airways Captain Tim Lancaster was sitting in his seat at 17,300 feet over Oxfordshire when his windscreen exploded outward — and he went with it. What followed in the next twenty minutes is one of the...
Share this story On February 1, 1943, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress flew home from Tunisia with its tail section barely attached — connected to the rest of the plane by little more than a few metal longerons and a strip of aluminum skin. The ten men inside...
Share this story On February 9, 1943, a fully fueled American military cargo aircraft took off from Florida with a crew of eight — and landed in Mexico four and a half hours later with a crew of zero. No hijacking. No remote control. Just the most incredible solo...
Share this story Imagine falling out of an airplane at 15,000 feet with no parachute. Now imagine landing back inside it. For one Royal Flying Corps gunner in 1918, this wasn’t a nightmare — it was just another Tuesday. Aviation has always been a realm where the...
Condividi questa storia Nell'aprile del 1942, il pilota da caccia sovietico Alexey Maresyev fu abbattuto dietro le linee nemiche sopra le foreste dell'oblast' di Novgorod. Ciò che seguì fu una delle storie più straordinarie – e in gran parte inedite – di resistenza umana nella storia dell'aviazione...
Share this story On the afternoon of Friday, 26 October 2001, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, stepped up to a podium in Washington. Three thousand kilometres away, Boeing chairman Phil Condit and his Joint Strike Fighter boss, Frank Statkus,...
Share this story It was a Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, 29 February 2008 — a leap day, fittingly, for a decision almost nobody saw coming. Air Force officials stepped before the press to name the winner of the KC-X tanker programme, 179 aircraft and roughly 35...
Share this story The desert air was still cool at Edwards Air Force Base on the morning of 27 August 1990 when Northrop chief test pilot Paul Metz taxied out in a machine that looked like nothing else on Earth. Charcoal grey, diamond-winged, its two tails canted...
Share this story On the morning of 25 January 1995, on the island of Andøya in Arctic Norway, a team of Norwegian and American scientists watched a four-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket climb away from its launcher and curve north-east over the sea towards...
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