Harold Brown watched his P-51 Mustang spiral toward the snow-covered field below, trailing smoke and debris. Only moments earlier, he’d been celebrating with his squadron mates as they decimated German WW2 supply trains: “I had that locomotive lit up like a Christmas tree.” Now, he hung suspended from his parachute, floating down into enemy territory. […]

June 4, 1942. It’s the height of the Pacific War, and Admiral Chuichi Nagumo stands on Akagi’s bridge. Below him stretches the pride of Japan’s navy, four aircraft carriers that struck Pearl Harbor just months earlier, now slicing through open water toward Midway Atoll. The plan is simple: crush the island’s defenses, then lure out […]

April 15, 1986. US Air Force Major Brian Shul streaks through the stratosphere fifteen miles over Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya in his Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Flying too high for enemy fighters to reach, too fast for missiles to catch, virtually invisible to radar, not a single one has been shot down in over two decades of […]

June 1990. The Soviets were about to do it again. Not since Sputnik had they so dramatically outpaced the West. They were about to deploy the most advanced vertical takeoff and landing combat aircraft the world had ever seen. The Yak-141, NATO reporting name Freestyle, didn’t just outperform the legendary British Harrier—it made it look […]

In 1963, as Soviet Tu-95 bombers pushed NATO response times to mere minutes, Britain faced a critical defense gap. Budget constraints left the Royal Navy without a modern fighter capable of intercepting threats at supersonic speeds. Facing being outdone by the Soviets, a desperate Britain did the unthinkable: they turned to a foreign warplane for […]

The Miles M.20 was an all-wood lightweight fighter and interceptor from Britain during World War II. This video looks at the idea of an emergency fighter, and the more technologically advanced examples from Germany in WW2, and some more simplistic examples from America. It then moves over to Britain’s example in the M.20, intended to […]