Share this story In the spring of 1942, Semyon Lavochkin was in trouble. His LaGG-3 fighter had a poor reputation at the front, it had cost him Stalin's favour, and the factories building it were being switched over to Yakovlev fighters. His design bureau was working...
Share this story In the small hours of 2 July 1919, at East Fortune in Scotland, the order came to walk her out. Ground crews hauled a 643-foot hydrogen airship out of its shed into a cold, misty north-easterly wind. On board were around 30 men, a kitten called...
Share this story It was a clear night over the Lebombo Mountains, with ten kilometres of visibility and only scattered cloud. At 21:21 on 19 October 1986, a Tupolev Tu-134 carrying the President of Mozambique flew into a hillside at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa...
Share this story It was a little after three on Saturday afternoon in East San Jose when a small propeller plane came down nose-first onto the roadway near Capitol Expressway and Excalibur Drive. The aircraft crumpled. Somehow, all three people inside survived: two...
Share this story For ten years, a Cold War fighter hung in the air over downtown Salt Lake City. Visitors to The Leonardo looked up and saw a former Polish Air Force MiG-21, red-and-white checkerboard on its tail, flying above a gleaming Convair C-131 Samaritan. Now...
Share this story At Frankfurt on Monday morning, a very long white airliner rolled out on the runway, slowed, and turned off for the last time with passengers aboard. Lufthansa flight LH419 from Washington Dulles had landed on schedule after eight hours and five...
Share this story On Sunday morning, people in northern Lithuania were told to take shelter. An unidentified drone was crossing the country, NATO fighters were climbing to find it, and nobody yet knew whose it was. Then it came down near the village of Juodžionys and...
Share this story The Austrian Airlines A320 was two hours out of Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, with 51 passengers in the cabin and Vienna still more than an hour away, when the crew received the message every airline crew dreads: a bomb threat against their flight. They...
At nearly 10 tonnes, the GBU-43/B MOAB is the biggest conventional bomb the US has ever used in combat. It is too big for any bomber and rolls out of the back of a cargo plane. Here is how it works, where it has been used, and what it cannot do.
Seventeen minutes after leaving Honolulu on 24 February 1989, the forward cargo door of a United Airlines 747 burst open and tore a hole in the cabin. Nine passengers were lost. The crew brought the crippled jet back, and a grieving family helped prove what had really gone wrong.
A Florida-based fleet of F-104 Starfighters is preparing to carry a rocket under its wing. In December, Starfighters Space plans the first captive-carry flight of its Starlaunch 1 development vehicle between Kennedy Space Center and Cecil Spaceport.
Share this story Six blue-and-gold jets get the screams. But before any of them roll down the runway, somebody has to haul the spare parts, the tool chests and about 40 people to the show. For more than half a century, that somebody has been a big, blue,...
Share this story The first attempt failed. On the second, a homemade monoplane built from sawmill scrap and cotton rolled down a slope in Athens, Georgia, lifted 40 to 50 feet into the air, flew about 100 yards and crashed, losing both wings. The local editor T. W....
Share this story At 17:43 on Saturday, 17 October 2026, two F-16s of the Romanian Air Force roared off the runway at the 86th Air Base at Borcea. Radar had picked up a group of targets about 120 kilometres east of Snake Island, heading south-west. Twenty-two minutes...
Share this story On 15 March 1975, a hang glider pilot stood on the frozen surface of a Wisconsin lake with a biplane glider on his shoulders and a small two-stroke engine buzzing behind him. There was no hill and no sea breeze to lift him. He opened the throttle,...
Share this story On Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, families waved from Portsmouth's Round Tower as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out to sea for the second phase of Operation Firecrest. She sails to take charge of the UK Carrier Strike Group in the North Atlantic and...
Share this story Positive rate of climb. Gear up. The pilot moves the lever, the hydraulics whine, and a few seconds later the wheels should be tucked away behind closed doors. Then a warning appears instead, or a gear leg simply stays where it is, hanging in the...