The Flying Whales That Built Apollo
On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing airliner whose...
Missing 25 Feet of Wing, He Landed It
At 11,000 feet over the wooded hills north of New York City, on a grey December afternoon, two airliners that were never supposed to meet found themselves on a converging path. Within seconds the tip of a Boeing 707’s left wing sliced through the triple tail of...
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
It was Christmas Eve, 1971, and the cabin smelled of pine and damp wool. Somewhere among the wrapped presents and the holiday cakes balanced on laps, a seventeen-year-old girl in a sleeveless mini-dress sat beside her mother, watching a wall of black cloud swallow the...
Stalin’s Rocket Plane and the Devil’s Broomstick
On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid and kerosene...
The First Man Saved by a Parachute
The sky over Dayton was the washed-out blue of a late October afternoon when Lieutenant Harold R. Harris felt his control stick begin to hammer in his hand. He was a mile and a half above the rooftops, throwing his stubby Loening monoplane through a mock dogfight,...
Four Firsts, Then Forgotten: The B-45 Tornado
On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston age with...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact loitering off the...
Boeing Won’t Build the Navy’s Next Trainer
Here is something you do not see every day: Boeing builds a brand-new jet trainer, wins the U.S. Air Force contract, and then tells the U.S. Navy, no thanks. On June 12, the company confirmed it will not bid the T-7A Red Hawk for the Navy’s Undergraduate Jet...
Wrong Way Corrigan: The Pilot Who “Accidentally” Flew the Atlantic
When the little monoplane bumped to a stop at Baldonnel Aerodrome outside Dublin on the morning of 18 July 1938, the ground crew did not quite know what they were looking at. The aircraft was a patchwork of solder and baling wire. The door was held shut by a twist of...
The $3,500 Drone That Kills Without a Pilot
The buzz of a Shahed over Kharkiv has become one of the most dreaded sounds of this war. On the night of 8 June 2026, something answered it that no human was flying. A small fixed-wing interceptor lifted off, climbed to its waiting altitude, picked the incoming drone...
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