On 26 October 1967 a surface-to-air missile blew the wing off John McCain’s A-4E Skyhawk over Hanoi. He came down in Truc Bach Lake with both arms and a leg broken. A local man named Mai Van On is credited with pulling him out. Here is what the record shows.
The SR-71 was designed to cruise above Mach 3 at more than 80,000 feet, where almost no one could see it. A handful of air show appearances let crowds watch, and hear, the Blackbird up close. Here is why those low passes were so rare, and so dramatic.
In 1993 Jeannie Leavitt finished first in her pilot training class, asked for the F-15E and was told women could not fly combat aircraft. Weeks later the ban was lifted. She went on to fly more than 300 combat hours, command a fighter wing and retire as a two-star general.
Share this story A Boeing 747-8 leaves the gate with up to 63,034 US gallons of kerosene on board. That is 238,609 litres, or 191,603 kilograms. Boeing puts the same aeroplane’s operating empty weight at 220,128 kilograms, so the fuel alone weighs almost as much...
Share this story At three seconds past 0847 on 8 January 2003, the captain of Air Midwest flight 5481 said two words into the cockpit voice recorder: “help me.” The Beech 1900D had just left runway 18R at Charlotte and the nose would not come down. Ten...
Share this story “Pitch oscillation” is one of those phrases that sounds mild right up until you read what the Federal Aviation Administration thinks it can turn into. On Monday the agency published a final rule ordering operators of almost two thousand...
Before he built one of the world’s biggest cargo airlines, Fred Smith led a Marine rifle company in Vietnam and flew forward air control in the OV-10. Then, with FedEx nearly out of cash, he flew to Las Vegas. Here is the story, and what he said about it himself.
Operation Starvation, 1945: B-29s of the 313th Bomb Wing laid about 12,000 mines in Japanese waters, shutting the Shimonoseki Strait and sea lanes.
NOTAMs explained: what a Notice to Airmen is, how to decode the ICAO Q line, how TFRs work, the 2023 FAA outage and the Air Canada 759 near-miss.
Lilian Bland designed, built and flew the Mayfly in Ireland in 1910, fuelling it from a whisky bottle and an ear trumpet. Then her father offered a car.
Hélène Boucher beat the men over 1,000 km, hit 445 km/h in a Caudron racer in 1934 and was the first woman to lie in state at Les Invalides.
Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to hold a pilot’s licence on 8 March 1910. Her crashes, the disputed Baroness title and her death.
Jean Mermoz flew the first air mail across the South Atlantic in 1930, survived the Sahara and the Andes, then vanished aboard the Croix-du-Sud in 1936.
The Fokker F27 Friendship: how a glued Dutch turboprop with Rolls-Royce Dart engines replaced the DC-3 and became Europe’s best-selling turboprop.
The BAC One-Eleven flew 18 months before the DC-9, sold to American Airlines, survived a deep-stall crash and was even built in Romania.
The F-106 Delta Dart was the USAF’s ultimate interceptor: SAGE-guided, Genie-armed, a Mach 2.31 record holder, then a drone and NASA lightning jet.
The Dassault Mystère IV: France’s first transonic fighter, paid for by the US, flown by the Patrouille de France and taken to war by Israel and India.