History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a spring morning in May 2026, a big blue Grumman Avenger lifted off over Hamilton, Ontario, and climbed into the sky for the first time in decades. In the cockpit was pilot James Bradley. Watching from the ground was a small group of people who had spent seventeen...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of Saturday, 27 October 1962, Major Rudolf “Rudy” Anderson Jr. was sealed into his pressure suit at McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida. He was not on the schedule that day — he had lobbied hard for the mission. It would be his sixth flight over...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind the wings, lying...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the autumn of 1932, a small, barrel-chested aeroplane painted red and white sat on a Cleveland airfield looking less like an aircraft than a cartoon of one. It was almost all engine — a giant radial nose bolted to a stubby fuselage, with the cockpit shoved so far...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Saturday morning, 28 July 1945. New York is wrapped in fog so thick that the top third of the Empire State Building has simply vanished. At 9:40 a.m., office workers on the 79th floor hear a sound no office worker should ever hear: aircraft engines, close, and getting...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 16 August 1966, an Iraqi Air Force captain named Munir Redfa strapped into his MiG-21F-13 for what his squadron believed was a routine long-range training sortie. He had full fuel tanks — a privilege he had rarely been granted — and a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was never the fastest, highest-climbing, or most manoeuvrable fighter of the Second World War. What it was, in every theatre from North Africa to China to the Aleutians, was available — and in the hands of pilots who understood its strengths,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 3 July 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 lifted off from Bandar Abbas International Airport bound for Dubai — a routine 28-minute hop across the Strait of Hormuz. Seven minutes later, the Airbus A300 was falling out of the sky in pieces, struck by two SM-2...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Fighter Two airstrip on Guadalcanal and turned west over the Solomon Sea. Their mission was not to engage enemy formations or escort bombers. It was to kill one man: Admiral Isoroku...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers — a fake...
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