Six men had already died chasing the Orteig Prize when an unknown airmail pilot took off from a wet field on Long Island in an aeroplane with no radio, no sextant and no way of seeing straight ahead. Thirty-three and a half hours later he landed in Paris three miles from where he meant to… Read article
The 1982 campaign in the air, from Black Buck and the tyranny of distance to San Carlos and the loss of Atlantic Conveyor. What each side flew, what each side lost, and what the official record says about both. Read article
The North American X-15 flew faster and higher than any piloted aircraft before it, 199 times between 1959 and 1968. The programme, the pilots, the records and what it cost. Read article
Tirpitz never once fired her main guns at an enemy warship. She spent almost the whole war at anchor in a Norwegian fjord, and she still cost the Allies more than almost any target of the war. Every Tirpitz raid, and there were more than twenty of them across three years, went after a ship… Read article
The Peenemünde raid, Operation Hydra, was flown on the night of 17/18 August 1943. That night the northern tip of Usedom lay under a waning gibbous moon, the Baltic silver beyond the pine belt, the sand flats and the reed edges of the Peenemünder Haken picked out as clearly as they would be at dusk.… Read article
At 08:20 on the morning of 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle sat in the cockpit of a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber at the forward end of the USS Hornet’s flight deck, engines run up against the brakes, the carrier’s bow rising and plunging through a grey North Pacific gale. Behind him, packed… Read article
The full story of Operation Chastise: Barnes Wallis and the bouncing bomb, 617 Squadron’s training, the attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe minute by minute, the human cost on both sides, and the raid’s long argument and legacy. Read article
The Handley Page Halifax flew over 75,000 Bomber Command sorties, towed the D-Day gliders and served the RAF until 1952. The full history of Britain’s other heavy bomber. Read article
The Fairey Swordfish was the aircraft that should not have worked: an open-cockpit fabric biplane, cruising below 110 mph, that entered service in 1936 and was obsolete on paper before the war began. It then crippled the Italian battle fleet at Taranto, jammed the Bismarck’s rudders, fought the U-boats from tiny merchant carriers, outlived the… Read article
The Vought F4U Corsair was the bent-wing bird: the US Navy’s fastest wartime fighter, a machine so powerful it was initially judged too dangerous for carrier decks, and a legend twice over, first in the Pacific island campaigns and again over Korea. Around 12,600 were built between 1942 and 1953, the longest production run of… Read article
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