History & Legends, Military Aviation
On February 1, 1943, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress flew home from Tunisia with its tail section barely attached — connected to the rest of the plane by little more than a few metal longerons and a strip of aluminum skin. The ten men inside didn’t know if the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On February 9, 1943, a fully fueled American military cargo aircraft took off from Florida with a crew of eight — and landed in Mexico four and a half hours later with a crew of zero. No hijacking. No remote control. Just the most incredible solo flight of the Second...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine falling out of an airplane at 15,000 feet with no parachute. Now imagine landing back inside it. For one Royal Flying Corps gunner in 1918, this wasn’t a nightmare — it was just another Tuesday. Aviation has always been a realm where the extraordinary...
Amazing Aviation Stories, Aviation History, History & Legends, Military Aviation, WWII
In April 1942, Soviet fighter pilot Alexey Maresyev was shot down behind enemy lines over the forests of Novgorod Oblast. What followed was one of the most extraordinary — and largely untold — stories of human endurance in the history of aviation. Shot Down Behind...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of Friday, 26 October 2001, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, stepped up to a podium in Washington. Three thousand kilometres away, Boeing chairman Phil Condit and his Joint Strike Fighter boss, Frank Statkus, gathered around a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was a Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, 29 February 2008 — a leap day, fittingly, for a decision almost nobody saw coming. Air Force officials stepped before the press to name the winner of the KC-X tanker programme, 179 aircraft and roughly 35 billion dollars, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The desert air was still cool at Edwards Air Force Base on the morning of 27 August 1990 when Northrop chief test pilot Paul Metz taxied out in a machine that looked like nothing else on Earth. Charcoal grey, diamond-winged, its two tails canted outward like the fins...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 25 January 1995, on the island of Andøya in Arctic Norway, a team of Norwegian and American scientists watched a four-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket climb away from its launcher and curve north-east over the sea towards Svalbard. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fifteen minutes past midnight, 26 September 1983. In a command bunker called Serpukhov-15, south-west of Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is settled into the commander’s chair for a night shift he was not originally scheduled to work. In front of him: the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the late afternoon of Saturday, 27 October 1962, the men of Soviet submarine B-59 had very little left to breathe. The boat had been at sea for almost four weeks, hiding from the US Navy in the warm water north of Cuba, and her batteries were nearly flat. With the...
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