The Fairey Fulmar was the F-14 Tomcat of its day, and I will prove it. Comparing the Fairey Fulmar to the Grumman F-14 Tomcat ...

Europe’s two middle-weight fighter aircraft, the Typhoon and Rafale, have fought tooth and nail for multi-billion Euro sales across the world. Geographically surrounded on four sides by the ...

If you were unlucky enough to still be flying a piston-engined fighter in 1949 you’d better hope your enemy didn’t have jets. The piston age was over. Though the ultimate piston-engined fighters were ...

What was the best fighter of World War II? The evolution of fighters in this period was a Darwinian bloodbath that would have had Richard Dawkins slavering with excitement. Whatever we put in this ...

The Soviet Union lasted a mere sixty-nine years (the Spitfire has been flying longer), but in that time produced some of the largest, fastest, toughest and most agile aircraft. Even now, 25 years ...

1946 was the zenith of piston-engined fighters. The bloody lessons learnt from the hundreds of thousands of dogfights fought in the War had been carefully noted by designers. This knowledge had been ...

The Soviet Union had its fair share of brilliant aeronautical engineers and aircraft designers. The likes of Ilyushin, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev, and the rest became household names, even in the West.

It seems hard to even mention Blackburn (‘Blackburn Aircraft Limited’ – and boy, weren’t they) without eliciting anecdotes about terrible, stolid, ugly or fatal aircraft. But does Blackburn deserve ...

The dream of a supersonic STOVL (Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing) fighter has been striven toward for over half of the history of heavier-than-air flight. When the F-35B reaches real operational ...

The first working submarine appears to have been invented as long ago as 1620 by Cornelius Van Drebbel whose demonstration of his creation on the Thames was recorded by Constantijn Huygens (below).

The English Electric Lightning was the most exciting jet fighter ever created. When it entered service, in 1959, it was the most formidable fighter in the world. For twenty nine years it thundered ...

When compiling this list of terrible French aircraft we ran up against an unexpected problem: France hasn’t made many terrible aeroplanes. In creating features on the worst British, American and ...