History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then vanishing under the...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
When the An-225 Mriya was destroyed in 2022, the world lost its single largest aircraft. But the West still keeps a giant of its own in the air — one that has been hauling tanks, helicopters and satellites around the planet since before the Moon landings, and is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the history of fighter aircraft, almost nobody remembers the runner-up. The jet that loses the competition gets a museum plaque, if it is lucky, and the winner gets the production line. The Northrop YF-17 Cobra is the great exception. It lost — and then went on to...
Aviation World, History & Legends
There are big aircraft, and then there was the Mriya. Stand under a Boeing 747 and you feel small. Stand under an An-225 and the 747 starts to look like the small one. For 33 years exactly one of these machines existed — a six-engined Soviet giant built for a single,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter for four armed...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico Piaggio walked...
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