Tens of millions of people say his name every year without knowing whose it is. They say it at a check-in desk, on a boarding pass, in a taxi line in Chicago: O’Hare. Behind the world’s busiest departures board is a 27-year-old fighter pilot who, on one...
On the grey afternoon of 12 February 1942, six ancient-looking biplanes lumbered off the runway at RAF Manston, near Dover, and turned out over a freezing sea. They were Fairey Swordfish — fabric-and-wire torpedo bombers with open cockpits and a top speed slower...
The flies came first. On Malta in the baking summer of 1942, they swarmed everything, and they swarmed the thin slices of corned beef the fighter pilots of 249 Squadron ate between sorties. One newcomer had a trick. He would set his plate on the floor, wait with his...
On the morning of 30 August 2026 — Victory Day, the most patriotic date on the Turkish calendar — a sleek grey jet lifted off, climbed away, and stayed airborne for just 18 minutes. It was a short flight with a long meaning. For the first time, a...
It was meant to be an ordinary Saturday morning in southern Hungary. Instead, a light aircraft lifted off from the grass at Kalocsa with a man at the controls who had no business flying it, and pointed its nose toward the one place in the country guaranteed to trigger...
Quando si elencano i grandi caccia della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, si citano lo Spitfire, il Mustang, il Bf 109, lo Zero. Raramente si menziona il Macchi C.202 Folgore, e questa è un'ingiustizia. Nelle mani giuste, l'elegante caccia italiano poteva superare in manovrabilità un...
Ogni jet ad ala a geometria variabile che è seguito — l'F-14 Tomcat, l'F-111, il Tornado, il B-1 — deve qualcosa a un piccolo, goffo e piuttosto pericoloso aereo da ricerca dei primi anni '50. Il Bell X-5 è stato il primo aereo al mondo in grado di cambiare...
Quando si pensa ai primi elicotteri pratici, di solito si immagina Igor Sikorsky e l'America in tempo di guerra. Ma anni prima che le macchine di Sikorsky raggiungessero la maturità, la Germania nazista costruì un elicottero da trasporto realmente utilizzabile, e nel settembre del 1945, uno di questi...
In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build in a garden shed...
On the evening of 10 May 1941, the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, alone, and pointed it at Scotland. No orders. No co-pilot. No authorisation from Hitler. Just Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, on a...
It was a hard-luck bomber nobody wanted — a battered B-17E scarred by oddball accidents and passed from unit to unit until its tail number gave it a new name: Old 666. A misfit pilot named Jay Zeamer requisitioned the wreck, rebuilt it into a private gunship,...
The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery that rebuilt their...
Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for regular carrier...
In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have been sent to a...
On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.” It was a Boeing...
It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of the Second World...
Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a quirk that made it...