Every helicopter engineer has the same dream: a machine that lifts straight up off a rooftop like a helicopter, then flies as fast as an aeroplane. The trouble is the rotor. It gives you vertical flight, but it also limits your speed — so what if, once you were...
Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points forward and the other...
When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right wing was about...
Imagine a fighter aircraft with four machine guns — and not one of them able to fire straight ahead. That was the Blackburn Roc. Its guns lived in a powered turret behind the pilot, so to shoot down an enemy the Roc had to fly alongside it, not at it. It is...
In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on ordinary jet engines....
On 3 July 1955, Western military attachés stood at the Soviet Aviation Day display at Tushino, near Moscow, and watched something that frightened them: wave after wave of big four-jet bombers thundering overhead. They counted, and re-counted, and went home...
On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most important legacy. That...
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...
When people list the great fighters of the Second World War, they name the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Bf 109, the Zero. They rarely mention the Macchi C.202 Folgore — and that is an injustice. In the right hands the sleek Italian fighter could out-turn a...
Every swing-wing jet that followed — the F-14 Tomcat, the F-111, the Tornado, the B-1 — owes a debt to one small, awkward and rather dangerous research aircraft from the early 1950s. The Bell X-5 was the first aeroplane in the world that could change the...
When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945, one of them...
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...