Share this story On 26 October 1967, Lieutenant Commander John McCain of attack squadron VA-163 rolled his A-4E Skyhawk into a dive on a thermal power plant in central Hanoi. As he started the dive, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile blew most of his right wing off....
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 On the night of 17 April 1973, fourteen small Dassault Falcon 20 jets took off from Memphis carrying 186 packages to 25 American cities. It was the first night of Federal Express. The man behind it, Frederick W. Smith, had learned to lead not in...
Share this story Late on the afternoon of 27 March 1945, 102 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses lifted off from Tinian. The crews had been firebombing Japanese cities for weeks, but on this night their bomb bays carried no incendiaries. Each bomber held a dozen sea mines....
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 the morning of 30 November 1934, a small blue-and-red Caudron racer came in to land at Guyancourt, just outside Versailles. It lost speed, dropped onto the treetops of the woods beyond the field and broke apart. The pilot, reached first by fellow...
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 At 10:43 on 7 December 1936, a radio operator somewhere over the South Atlantic tapped out a short line of Morse from the flying boat Croix-du-Sud: “Coupons moteur arrière droit” – cutting the rear starboard engine. Then the...
Share this story On 24 November 1955 a high-winged prototype registered PH-NIV took to the air for the first time. It had two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, a pressurised cabin and an airframe in which much of the metal was glued together rather than riveted. According...
Share this story On 20 August 1963 a small, sharp-nosed jet in British United Airways colours lifted off from Hurn, near Bournemouth. It had two Rolls-Royce engines bolted to the back of the fuselage, a tailplane perched on top of the fin, and a head start that its...
Share this story The alert call came at 12:25 a.m. on a black winter morning, with the temperature at 28 degrees below zero. Within 75 minutes, all 26 of the squadron’s interceptors stood ready on a snowbound flight line, and soon the pilots were strapped in,...
Share this story Melun-Villaroche, 28 September 1952. Kostia Rozanoff, Dassault’s chief test pilot, lifts a silver prototype off the runway and stays aloft for 25 minutes. In level flight the new jet touches Mach 0.92, comfortably beyond what its designers had...
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