Share this story When Jeannie Leavitt finished US Air Force pilot training at Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas, in early 1993, she had the grades to choose almost any aircraft. She asked for the F-15E Strike Eagle. The answer was no: women were not allowed to fly combat...
Share this story The engine arrived in Ulster in the summer of 1910 without its petrol tank. Its owner was not willing to wait. She filled an empty whisky bottle with fuel, borrowed the only tubing in the house, which happened to be her deaf aunt’s ear trumpet,...
Share this story On 22 October 1909, on the army parade ground at Châlons in eastern France, a woman climbed alone into a Voisin biplane. The machine had only one seat, so there was no room for an instructor. She taxied, opened the throttle, lifted off and flew about...
Share this story Rain had the last word on Sunday. On Monday, 19 October 2026, the Indian Air Force’s Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team came back to Mysuru and flew the show the city had been waiting for. The team’s red-and-white BAE Hawk Mk132 jets arrived over...
Share this story Shortly before noon on Wednesday 13 June 1917, Londoners did something that now seems unthinkable. They stepped out of offices, shops and tea rooms and looked up. A formation of big biplanes was sliding across a clear summer sky towards the City, and...
Share this story Somewhere along Ukraine’s front line, a wounded infantryman sat alone in a position he could not leave. The ground around him was mined. Russian drones watched the approaches. The robot vehicles that now carry so many of Ukraine’s...
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 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 F-104 Starfighter first flew in 1954. Seventy-two years later, a small fleet of them in Florida is being turned into a launch platform. Starfighters Space, which operates the world’s largest civil fleet of F-104s, has announced that it will...
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 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 Sixteen thousand feet above the North Sea, 32 nautical miles north-north-east of Cromer, an RAF Voyager tanker was passing fuel to a Typhoon on 18 February 2026. Then something black and circular flashed towards the windscreen and passed 100 to 150...
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