How Sweden Saved a Crippled American Spy Plane
At 75,000 feet over the Baltic Sea, the world is dark blue above and curved below, and the only sound in the cockpit is the hiss of the pressure suit. On the morning of 29 June 1987, that calm ended with a bang.The right engine of Lt. Col. Duane Noll’s SR-71 Blackbird...
Canada to West Africa, Nonstop at Last
For as long as anyone could remember, getting from Montreal to Dakar meant flying the wrong way first. North-east to Paris or Brussels, a layover, then back south to Senegal — a journey of twelve hours or more to reach a city that sits almost due east across the...
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...
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 Bristol Freighter Awakens: Saving the Sky’s Clamshell Car-Carrier
It is a grey, gusty morning on the Kent coast in 1955, and a man in a tweed jacket is doing something that looks faintly absurd: he is driving his Austin straight into the nose of an aeroplane. Ahead of him, two great rounded doors stand open like the jaws of a whale....
After the Iran War, Israel Orders More Stealth
The order came not from a battlefield but from a committee room. On a Sunday in early May 2026, a panel of senior Israeli ministers signed off on a plan that had been gathering urgency for the better part of a year: buy two more squadrons of American fighters, and buy...
India and Brazil Plot a Jet-for-Jet Swap
Two of the world’s biggest emerging powers are quietly negotiating one of the most unusual arms deals of the decade — and almost no Western capital is in the room. India and Brazil are working toward a barter: India would hand Brazil its homegrown Tejas Mk1A fighters...
Recent Comments