On June 20, 1965, two MiG-17s circled the smoking wreckage of an F-4 Phantom deep in North Vietnam, the first of its kind shot down in the war. The MiG pilots expected what usually came next: more Phantoms screaming in at twice the speed of sound. Then they heard a sound that didn’t belong in 1965: […]

The Red Bull Skydive Team has been pushing the boundaries of conventional freefall since first dropping from the sky in style in 2014. Launching themselves through the clouds from anywhere between 1,000 to 4,000m above the ground the trio of Marco Fürst, Marco Waltenspiel and Max Manow are the ultimate specialists shaping the future of […]

The XF-90 was built like no fighter before… or since. At a time when no one knew what supersonic flight would do to metal, Skunk Works chose brute force over guesswork. They forged the strongest airframe on Earth: 75S aluminum over a steel spine, the fuselage braced until it was closer to armour than aircraft. […]

Meet the Hawker Sea Fury, the Royal Navy’s last and fastest piston fighter, a “super prop” born at the edge of the jet age. In this episode we dive into its Sopwith/Hawker roots, the Bristol Centaurus sleeve-valve engine, combat over Korea and the Bay of the Pigs, and its second life dominating the Reno Air […]

November 10, 1943, Rechlin test facility. Hauptmann Hans-Werner Lerche climbed into the cockpit of a captured P-47 Thunderbolt nicknamed “Beetle.” Intelligence briefings had told him American fighters were crude, mass-produced machines built by a nation better at making refrigerators than aircraft. After ninety minutes of flying, Lerche would write something dangerous: “The Americans haven’t built […]

Flak bloomed around him. Tracers lanced past like electric needles. Captain Robin Olds didn’t flinch; he was already lining up his next target. Scat II, his silver P-38 Lightning, screamed across the sky, twin engines snarling as it tore through Messerschmitts. Then, he saw movement below. A lone Mustang, twisting hard, two Bf 109s welded […]

June 27, 1950. Seoul has fallen. At Suwon Airfield, American civilians are trapped as North Korean fighters strafe the runway, destroying transports one by one. Enemy armor is twenty miles away and closing. North Korean radar picks up five unidentified contacts approaching from the sea. The flight leader squints through his La-7 canopy. Whatever these […]

The Northrop P-61 Black Widow is a twin-engine United States Army Air Forces fighter aircraft of World War II. It was the first operational U.S. warplane designed specifically as a night fighter. Named for the North American spider Latrodectus mactans, it was an all-metal, twin-engine, twin-boom design armed with four forward-firing 20 mm (.79 in) Hispano M2 autocannon in the lower fuselage, […]

The Thunderscreech was an experimental American turboprop plane created to as an experimental variant of the the F-84 Thunderstreak fighter jet. Development began after the Navy issued a requirement seeking a carrier fighter that could take off without a catapult – a problem still facing jet powered aircraft at the time. Even though the Navy […]