You step onto a parked airliner and everything just works. The cabin lights are on, the air is cool, screens are glowing — and yet the two great engines on the wings are stone-cold silent. Somewhere behind you, a faint high-pitched whine is the only clue to what...
Launching a torpedo is the easy part. The hard part is what happens next: keeping a one-tonne self-propelled bomb running dead straight and at exactly the right depth, through the chaos of the sea, toward a ship that is moving and may be more than a mile away. There...
For most of military history, shooting down an aircraft with artillery was a grim game of chance. Gunners flung up thousands of shells set to burst at a guessed altitude, hoping one happened to explode at the exact instant an enemy plane flew past. Then a small...
As the Third Reich’s fortunes collapsed, its engineers reached for ever more extreme ideas. Some were genuinely brilliant. Some were merely enormous. And a few belonged squarely in science fiction. Hitler’s faith in war-winning “wonder weapons”...
In 1942, with the tide of the Pacific war already turning against them, Japanese planners sketched out an aircraft of breathtaking ambition. It would take off from Japanese soil, fly across the Pacific, bomb the industrial cities of the United States — and then,...
For the last few years, the main battle tank has been written off as a dinosaur — a 70-tonne monster that a $500 drone can turn into scrap. So why is China pouring resources into tanks? Because it is building a very different kind: lighter, cheaper, more...
High above the misty jungle mountains of Laos, an unarmed supply helicopter found itself in the middle of an air raid. Its crew had a choice: flee, or fight back with the only weapon on board — a single AK-47 rifle. They chose to fight. What happened next has...
It needs no gunpowder, no explosive warhead, and no rocket motor. It simply uses electricity and magnetism to fling a chunk of metal at seven times the speed of sound, destroying its target through raw kinetic energy. For a while, the electromagnetic railgun looked...
Look closely at the photograph: those are two full-size 1950s automobiles, parked comfortably underneath the helicopter. Above them sits a single rotor so vast that each of its two blades weighs as much as a small car and is wide enough to walk along. And it was spun...
Every so often, a clip resurfaces online claiming that the Hollywood star Emma Stone made history as “the first civilian to fly in an F-22 Raptor.” It collects millions of views, a flurry of amazed comments, and the occasional breathless re-share. It is...
Ask almost anyone which aircraft won the Battle of Britain and you will get the same answer: the Spitfire. It is one of the most beautiful machines ever built, and it has earned its legend. But it is, at best, only half the story. The aircraft that actually shot down...
In a refrigerated room hidden beneath London’s Smithfield Meat Market in 1943, behind a screen of hanging animal carcasses, a future Nobel Prize winner was busy perfecting a recipe. Not for food — for a building material. His task: prove that you could...
Late one night in 1941, a U.S. Navy pilot sat at his kitchen table in Coronado, California, pushing matchsticks around the wood. He had never met the enemy fighter that was terrifying the fleet — the nimble Japanese Zero — but he had read the reports, and...
It was designed to cruise at three times the speed of sound, climb to the edge of the stratosphere, and kill Soviet bombers from more than a hundred miles away. On paper, the North American XF-108 Rapier was one of the most formidable interceptors ever conceived. It...
Imagine an aircraft with no cockpit as you would recognise it — no seat, no upright pilot peering over a nose. Instead, the airman lies flat on his stomach inside a glazed cone at the very front of what is, essentially, a flying engine. This was not science...
At 07:45 on the morning of June 5, 1967, Egyptian fighter pilots were finishing breakfast. Their dawn patrols had just landed; the sky was quiet. It was, by design, the most dangerous moment of their day. Minutes later, French-built Israeli jets came howling in below...
On a Sunday morning in April 1943, sixteen American fighter planes skimmed the surface of the Pacific so low their propellers feathered the wave tops. They flew for the better part of a thousand miles in radio silence, navigating by dead reckoning over featureless...
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