Ask which fighter the RAF prized most in the last year of the Second World War and most people will say the Spitfire. They would be wrong. The aircraft that its pilots rated above all others — faster on the deck than a Spitfire, deadlier against the V-1, and one of the very few Allied fighters that could run down a German jet — was the Hawker Tempest. And almost nobody remembers it.

One of its greatest pilots, the French ace Pierre Clostermann, put it more bluntly than any specification sheet ever could.

Born from a flawed brute

The Tempest grew out of the Hawker Typhoon, a powerful but troubled fighter that shook itself to pieces at high speed. Hawker gave the design a new, thin, laminar-flow wing that cured its problems and unlocked its performance. Bolted to a snarling 2,180-horsepower Napier Sabre engine, the Tempest V could reach around 435 mph — and down low, where it mattered, it was the fastest Allied fighter in the sky.

The V-1 killer

The Tempest reached the squadrons in the spring of 1944, just in time for Hitler’s flying-bomb offensive. Its speed at low level made it the ideal V-1 hunter, chasing down the buzz bombs over southern England and tipping or shooting them out of the sky. Tempest pilots destroyed more than 800 V-1s — more than any other aircraft type, working alongside the RAF’s first jet, the Gloster Meteor.

Fast enough to catch a jet

Then came the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter — faster than anything the Allies had. Yet the Tempest was one of the rare piston fighters that could catch and kill a 262, pouncing on the jets at low altitude as they slowed to land. Tempest pilots claimed around twenty of them. Between times, the aircraft ranged across north-west Europe as a devastating ground-attack machine.

The men who loved it

Clostermann, France’s highest-scoring pilot in the RAF, rated the Tempest the finest fighter he flew in the entire war — better even than the Spitfire and the Mustang. The wing that pioneered it was led by Roland “Bee” Beamont, who worked out the tactics that turned the Tempest’s raw speed into a war-winning weapon. To the men who flew it, there was no argument about which fighter they wanted.

Overlooked, but flying again

So why is the Tempest forgotten? Timing and image. It arrived late, served briefly, and was overshadowed forever by the graceful Spitfire that had already won the nation’s heart in 1940. Of the many hundreds built, just one airworthy Tempest exists today — MW763, returned to the sky in 2023 after a 34-year restoration, a rare chance to hear a Napier Sabre sing again.

The Spitfire got the fame. The Tempest got the job — and the quiet, fierce loyalty of the men who took it to war.

Sources: Wikipedia; Military Machine; Pierre Clostermann, “The Big Show”; Key Aero; hawkertempest.se.

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Ask anyone to name Britain’s heavy bomber of the Second World War and they will say the Avro Lancaster — the Dam Busters’ mount, the star of every film and airshow flypast. Almost nobody says Handley Page Halifax. Yet the Halifax flew tens of thousands of sorties, did jobs the Lancaster couldn’t, and gave its crews a far better chance of coming home alive. It is the great forgotten workhorse of Bomber Command.

This is the bomber that lived in the Lancaster’s shadow — and, in several ways that mattered, quietly outdid it.

Overshadowed from the start

The Halifax first flew in October 1939 and entered Bomber Command service in early 1941, more than a year before the Lancaster. In all, 6,178 were built. But the head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, never warmed to it — the Lancaster carried a bigger bomb load, and that was the number Harris cared about.

The jack-of-all-trades

Where the Lancaster was a superb bomb-truck and little else, the Halifax could turn its hand to almost anything. It towed the Horsa and Hamilcar gliders that carried airborne troops into Normandy and Arnhem — a job it did better than the Lancaster thanks to steadier low-speed handling. It flew for Coastal Command hunting U-boats with radar and depth charges, and for the Special Operations Executive, dropping agents and supplies to resistance fighters across occupied Europe.

Later marks swapped the Rolls-Royce Merlins for air-cooled Bristol Hercules radials, which shrugged off flak damage that would have crippled a liquid-cooled engine — and closed most of the performance gap with the Lancaster.

The number that really mattered

For the young men flying over Germany at night, one statistic dwarfed all the arguments about bomb loads: your chance of getting out of a stricken aircraft. The Halifax’s wider fuselage and larger escape hatches gave its crews a dramatically better shot at survival if they had to bail out.

Remembered at last

Only a handful of Halifaxes survive anywhere in the world, chief among them “Friday the 13th” at the Yorkshire Air Museum on the old bomber airfield at Elvington. It is a fittingly modest memorial to an aircraft that never got the glory — but carried more of the war’s weight than its famous stablemate ever gets credit for.

The Lancaster got the legend. The Halifax got the job done — and brought more of its crews home.

Sources: Wikipedia; Britannica; The National Interest; Yorkshire Air Museum; Bomber Command Museum of Canada.

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Most warplanes are lucky to see one war. The Douglas A-26 Invader saw three — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — the only American bomber ever to do so. Now one of these remarkable survivors has a new home: the Stockton Field Aviation Museum in California’s Central Valley has added an A-26C Invader to its collection, and it is already turning heads at West Coast airshows.

It is exactly the kind of aircraft that deserves to be kept flying: fast, heavily armed, and stubbornly refusing to become obsolete across three decades of combat.

The bomber that wouldn’t retire

The Invader first flew as the XA-26 prototype in July 1942 and reached the front in 1944, meant to replace a whole generation of earlier attack aircraft. Two big Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radials made it fast for a bomber, and it came in two flavours: a solid gun-nose strafer bristling with up to fourteen forward-firing .50-calibre machine guns, and a glazed “glass nose” bombardier version like the museum’s new A-26C.

After the war it was redesignated the B-26, fought again over Korea, and was even recalled and rebuilt for Vietnam as the B-26K Counter Invader, hunting trucks along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Few aircraft have had such a long and violent working life.

A new home in the Central Valley

The aircraft, an A-26C registered N126HK, came to the Stockton Field Aviation Museum from the Cactus Air Force in Carson City, Nevada, with the help of longtime enthusiast Jan Johnson. It has since been repainted in the markings of the 386th Bomb Group, connecting it to the Invader’s wartime roots.

Restoring the glass nose, aiming for Oshkosh

The museum plans to fly the Invader in its Bomber Camp experiences and is raising money to rebuild the aircraft’s intricate glazed nose. The goal is to bring it to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in 2026, where organisers hope to gather several A-26s together to tell the story of a type that spanned three wars.

Worth keeping in the air

Every warbird saved is a piece of history kept alive for people who will never otherwise hear a pair of Double Wasps thunder overhead. For the Invader — a design that outlived its own era by decades — a new home and a run at Oshkosh is a fitting next chapter.

Sources: Vintage Aviation News; Stockton Field Aviation Museum; Hill Aerospace Museum; Wikipedia.

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Some aircraft are ugly by accident. The Blackburn Blackburn was ugly on purpose — and yes, that really is its name, not a printing error. A deep, slab-sided box of a biplane that looked like a garden shed had learned to fly, it is a perennial contender for the title of ugliest aircraft ever to enter military service. And here is the twist: it was actually rather good at its job.

Because the Royal Navy had not asked Blackburn for a beauty. It had asked for a flying radio room — and that is precisely what it got.

A flying radio room

In the early 1920s the Fleet Air Arm needed a carrier aircraft that could scout ahead of the battle fleet and, crucially, spot the fall of the fleet’s big-gun shells and radio corrections back to the ships. That meant carrying an observer, charts, and a bulky wireless set — and giving them room to work. Blackburn’s designer took the wings and tail from the company’s Dart torpedo bomber and bolted them to a huge new fuselage tall enough to swallow all that equipment. Elegant it was not.

Ugly, and unbothered by it

The three-man crew were stacked into that bluff fuselage: the pilot sat in an open cockpit up above the engine, the navigator worked inside the fuselage, and a gunner sat at the back with a Lewis gun on a swivel mount. A 450-horsepower Napier Lion pulled the whole thing along at a stately 122 mph. It broke the old flying-club maxim that “if it looks right, it is right” — because this looked deeply wrong and worked anyway. For a gallery of aircraft that share its affliction, see our roundup of the strangest and ugliest aircraft ever built.

The eyes of the fleet

The Blackburn first went to sea aboard the carrier HMS Eagle in the Mediterranean in 1923. A more powerful version, the Blackburn II with an uprated Napier Lion, followed, and some airframes were converted into dual-control trainers or fitted with floats. In all, around 62 were built — a respectable run for a specialist 1920s carrier aircraft.

Replaced by something prettier

Aviation was moving fast in the 1920s, and the Blackburn’s eight-year career ended around 1931 when the sleeker Fairey IIIF took over its duties. Blackburn Aircraft would go on to build a whole menagerie of famously awkward machines — and, eventually, the beautiful Blackburn Buccaneer, proof the firm could draw a gorgeous aeroplane when it wanted to.

But the Blackburn Blackburn earns its own strange salute: an aircraft so ugly it became a legend, and so useful the Navy kept it at sea for the better part of a decade.

Sources: Wikipedia; Ed Nash / Military Matters; historyofwar.org; BAE Systems Heritage; Naval Encyclopedia.

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Imagine buying an airline ticket and being shown not to a seat in the fuselage, but into the wing itself — a little cabin built into the leading edge, with a big curved window giving you the pilot’s own view of the world rushing toward you. That was the everyday reality aboard the Junkers G.38, a German giant of 1929 that treated flying not as an ordeal to be survived but as an experience to be savoured.

When it lifted off from Dessau in November 1929, the G.38 was the largest landplane on Earth, beaten in sheer size only by the monstrous Dornier Do X flying boat. And nobody had ever built a passenger aircraft quite like it.

A dream sketched in 1910

The idea was older than the aircraft. Hugo Junkers had long believed that an aeroplane should not dangle its passengers beneath a thin wing, but carry everything — people, engines, structure — inside a deep, load-bearing wing. He had sketched the concept as early as 1910; it simply took two decades for engines, materials and money to catch up.

By the late 1920s, with German aviation shaking off the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, Junkers finally got his chance. The result felt part aircraft, part flying salon.

A flying palace

The G.38 was an all-metal colossus — 23 metres long, with a 44-metre wingspan wider than many of today’s narrow-body jets. Its wings were nearly two metres thick at the root, thick enough to hold passenger compartments and small “engine rooms” where a mechanic could reach and service the motors in flight. From the wing cabins, and from two seats right in the nose, large windows offered a forward view usually reserved for the crew.

Originally the aircraft carried just 17 passengers in near-airship luxury — wide upholstered seats, a promenade area, a smoking room, a proper washroom. The four engines were buried in the wings, with only driveshafts running out to the propellers, cutting drag and noise. A second, larger machine added a second deck and room for 34.

Too grand for its moment

Deutsche Luft Hansa flew the two G.38s across Europe in the early 1930s, from Berlin to London, Vienna and Amsterdam, and the type set records for speed, endurance and payload. Technically it was a triumph. Commercially, its timing could hardly have been worse.

The Great Depression gutted air travel just as the G.38 arrived, and airlines fled toward small, cheap, efficient aircraft like the Junkers Ju 52, which would be built in their thousands. A flying palace needing big crews and heavy maintenance was exactly the wrong aeroplane for a lean decade.

Two aircraft, both gone

Only two G.38s were ever built. The first was damaged beyond repair in a 1936 accident at Dessau and scrapped. The second was seized by the Nazi regime in 1939, pressed into service as a military transport, and destroyed on the ground by British bombers at Athens in 1941. Japan built six bomber derivatives, the Mitsubishi Ki-20, but they never saw combat.

No G.38 was ever built again — not because it failed, but because the world moved on faster than the aeroplane could. For a few short years, though, a lucky few got to fly Europe seated inside a wing, watching the horizon through their own private windscreen.

Sources: Wikipedia; Vintage Aviation News; Airways Magazine; Oleg Antonov State Aviation Museum; NACA Aircraft Circular No. 116.

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It looked like a four-poster bed welded out of scaffolding, and it flew by balancing on a column of jet blast. When the Rolls-Royce Thrust Measuring Rig lurched into the air at Hucknall in 1954, it became the first jet-lift aircraft to fly anywhere in the world — and it looked so absurd that the engineers who built it simply called it the Flying Bedstead.

Behind the comedy was a serious problem nobody had solved: could a jet aircraft hover on its own thrust and be controlled while doing it? The Bedstead answered yes, and in doing so it lit the fuse for every British vertical-takeoff aircraft that followed, right up to the Harrier.

Two engines and a lot of nerve

The rig was brutally logical. Two Rolls-Royce Nene turbojets were mounted horizontally, facing away from each other, their exhausts bent through 90 degrees to blast straight down through the machine’s centre of gravity. To keep the whole contraption from tipping over, engineers bled about a tenth of the engines’ compressed air out to small “puffer” nozzles at the extremities — jets of air that pushed the frame level, like a tightrope walker’s pole made of compressed gas.

On 3 August 1954, Rolls-Royce chief test pilot Ronald Shepherd made the first free flight. The rig rose, hovered, edged sideways and backwards, and set back down — unremarkable moves for a helicopter, revolutionary for a jet.

Rock steady — most of the time

With its autostabiliser working, pilots found the Bedstead uncannily calm in the hover. But it was not tame. The hardest part was controlling height, because the big Nene engines were slow to respond to the throttle, so a pilot chasing altitude could easily get behind the machine. Roll control, too, was marginal.

The crash and the cost

Two rigs were built, and pioneering flight research is rarely bloodless. The second machine crashed in 1957 during a tethered hover, killing its pilot, and Rolls-Royce’s own flying with the type came to an end. But the data had already been gathered, and the central question — can a jet hover under control? — had been answered beyond doubt.

What the Bedstead started

The Bedstead’s reaction-control idea — puffer jets at the wingtips, nose and tail to steer an aircraft too slow for its normal controls to bite — became the key to everything that followed. It fed directly into the Short SC.1, Britain’s first fixed-wing VTOL aircraft, which used a battery of lift engines to rise and a separate engine to fly forward.

The SC.1 proved that a machine could transition from hovering to winged flight and back. But carrying a stack of engines just for take-off was a dead end. The breakthrough came when Hawker fitted a single vectored-thrust engine to the P.1127, the aircraft that matured into the Harrier — the world’s first operational jump jet, and still the most famous. Every one of them kept the Bedstead’s puffer jets for control in the hover.

Not bad for a flying bedframe.

Sources: Wikipedia; Rolls-Royce / Aeronautical Research Council R&M 3336; Science Museum Group; The Engineer; Dunsfold Airfield History Society.

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Somewhere over Germany in the last winter of the war, four P-51 Mustangs slid in behind a lone, unfamiliar fighter and prepared to pounce. The pilot did not turn to dogfight. He pushed the throttle to the stop, triggered a chemical boost that shoved extra horsepower into his engine, and simply pulled away — leaving four of the best fighters in the world behind. The man at the controls was not a combat ace. He was the aircraft’s chief designer, Kurt Tank.

The aircraft was the Focke-Wulf Ta 152, the last and finest of Germany’s piston-engined fighters. It arrived too late and in too few numbers to change anything — but in the right hands, at the right altitude, almost nothing could catch it.

The last of the great piston fighters

The Ta 152 grew out of the superb Fw 190, refined into a specialist high-altitude interceptor. The “Ta” in its name was an honour: German practice tied a type to its manufacturer, but Focke-Wulf’s technical director Kurt Tank had earned a personal designation. The definitive Ta 152H stretched the wings for thin air and fitted the Junkers Jumo 213E, a supercharged inline engine fed by two boost systems — MW 50 water-methanol down low and GM-1 nitrous up high.

The result was startling. With boost engaged the Ta 152H could reach roughly 470 mph at around 44,000 feet, an altitude where escorting Mustangs and Thunderbolts wheezed and the German fighter still had energy to spare. It carried a 30 mm cannon firing through the propeller hub and a pair of 20 mm guns in the wing roots.

The day the designer showed them

The most famous Ta 152 story needs no combat report. Ferrying an early Ta 152H from Focke-Wulf’s base at Langenhagen to the factory at Cottbus, Kurt Tank was warned by the control tower that four P-51D Mustangs were closing fast behind him. Rather than fight, Tank firewalled the throttle, engaged the water-methanol boost, and outran them cleanly.

The baffled American pilots reported the encounter — and it was among the first hints the Allies had that the Luftwaffe had fielded a propeller-driven fighter that could simply run away from a Mustang. That the man flying it had also designed it only sharpened the point.

Too few, too late

For all its brilliance, the Ta 152 was a footnote in the air war. Fewer than 70 were completed between October 1944 and February 1945, and they reached only a handful of units, chiefly the fighter wing tasked with protecting Germany’s vulnerable jet airfields. There were simply not enough, flown by too few experienced pilots, in a sky the Allies already owned. A single Ta 152 survives today, preserved by the Smithsonian.

The designer’s second and third acts

Kurt Tank’s career did not end in 1945. Recruited to Argentina, he led the design of the Pulqui II, one of the first jet fighters built in South America. When Perón fell, Tank moved again — this time to India, where he headed the team that created the HAL HF-24 Marut, the first jet combat aircraft designed and built in India.

Few engineers leave a mark on three continents. Fewer still climb into their own creations and outfly the enemy’s best. The Ta 152 never got the war it was built for — but the story of the designer who left four Mustangs standing has outlived every one of them.

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; HistoryNet; Eric Brown, “Wings of the Luftwaffe”; historyofwar.org; Wikipedia.

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A stealth fighter’s first taxi run is not glamorous. It rolls out of the hangar, creeps down the taxiway under its own power, and stops. But for Turkey, the sight of its second Kaan prototype trundling along the apron at Ankara on Jul. 31, 2026 was a big deal — the last major step before an all-new, production-shaped stealth fighter takes to the air.

The aircraft is designated P1, and Turkish Aerospace Industries released video of it moving under power for the first time. Officials say it could fly before the end of the year. If it does, Turkey moves a long way closer to something only a handful of nations possess: a home-grown fifth-generation fighter.

Why P1 matters more than P0

Turkey has flown a Kaan before — the P0 demonstrator lifted off in February 2024. But P0 was a proof of concept. P1, and its sister ship P2, are “production-representative” airframes: built to reflect the fighter Turkey actually intends to field, with the lessons of the first prototype baked in.

The differences are visible. Compared with P0, P1 has a cleaner, more aerodynamic fuselage, reshaped and repositioned engine intakes, and wider spacing between its two engines. Most tellingly, it carries a prominent forward-looking sensor above the nose — a combined infrared search-and-track and targeting system for spotting and tracking threats without radiating a single radar pulse.

Taxi testing is where an aircraft’s brakes, steering, and ground handling get checked at steadily rising speeds. It is the bridge between a jet that exists and a jet that flies. TAI chief executive Mehmet Demiroğlu, speaking at the Farnborough Airshow, was careful not to promise a date.

The engine problem hanging over it all

For now, Kaan flies on the American General Electric F110-GE-129, the same engine family that powers late-model F-16s, assembled under licence in Turkey but still bound by US export controls. That dependence is exactly what Ankara wants to escape. Turkey is pushing hard on an indigenous engine, the TEI TF35000, intended to power later production batches and free the programme from Western leverage.

The politics are impossible to separate from the airframe. Turkey started down this road in earnest after Washington threw it out of the F-35 Lightning II programme in 2019, punishment for buying the Russian S-400 air-defence system. Kaan is both a genuine fighter programme and a statement: a NATO member building its own stealth jet rather than waiting for permission to buy someone else’s.

Close, but not airborne yet

Taxi trials are not flight, and stealth-fighter programmes have a habit of slipping. But the pace is real — Turkey wants both P1 and P2 flying by the end of 2026 to run their test campaigns in parallel. For a country that was locked out of the world’s dominant fifth-generation fighter just seven years ago, a Kaan rolling down the runway under its own power is a pointed reply.

Sources: Turkish Aerospace Industries; The War Zone; Quwa; Daily Sabah; Defense Arabia; The Aviationist.

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Canada is heading into its August long weekend with a familiar knot in its stomach: another airline, another strike clock ticking. On 30 July, the flight attendants who staff WestJet's cabins served the airline with 72 hours' strike notice. WestJet fired back the same day with a lockout notice of its own. Either way, the countdown now points at the same moment — 12:01 a.m. Mountain Time on 2 August.

The two sides, by the union's own account, remain "too far apart" on the issues that matter. And the issue that matters most is one that has become the defining fight of North American cabin crews: unpaid work.

The fight over unpaid hours

Flight attendants are, in most contracts, paid only once the aircraft doors close and the plane pushes back. The boarding, the delays on the ramp, the endless "we're just waiting on a connecting passenger" — all of it, traditionally, is off the clock. CUPE 8125, the union representing WestJet's cabin crew, says the airline's credit-hour system leaves roughly 35 hours of work every month unpaid.

If that fight sounds familiar, it is. Barely a year ago, Air Canada's flight attendants walked out over precisely the same grievance — and their strike was cut short when the federal government stepped in to force them back to work. CUPE has clearly not forgotten: this time it is publicly urging Ottawa to stay out and let the two sides reach a deal at the table.

What it means for travellers

WestJet has already begun parking aircraft and winding operations down in an orderly way, so passengers are not stranded mid-journey if the deadline passes. Travellers booked between 30 July and 4 August can make a one-time change or cancel without a fee. It is cold comfort on one of the busiest travel weekends of the Canadian summer, but it beats being stuck at a gate with nowhere to go.

Both sides insist they would rather settle than shut down. The union has said flatly that a strike notice is not the same as wanting to strike. Whether that goodwill survives contact with a midnight deadline is the question hanging over every WestJet booking this weekend.

Sources: Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE 8125); Global News; CTV News; AeroTime; WestJet.

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For years, flying Allegiant meant paying for everything that was not the seat itself — the carry-on, the boarding pass at the airport, and yes, the cup of soda. That is the whole point of an ultra-low-cost carrier: a rock-bottom fare, then a menu of extras. So it is a genuine surprise that, from 1 August, Allegiant will hand you a drink for nothing.

Complimentary beverage service — sodas, juice and water — now comes standard on every Allegiant flight. Passengers who carry the airline's Allways Rewards Visa get a longer list: coffee, protein shakes, sports drinks, or an alcoholic drink with a mixer, on the house.

A budget airline reaches upmarket

The free drink is the small, visible half of a bigger move. Allegiant also announced a brand-new premium cabin, "Allegiant First," which will be phased onto select aircraft starting in spring 2027, with seats going on sale as soon as mid-August. It will sit alongside — not replace — the existing Allegiant Extra product, and bundle in priority check-in and boarding plus a generous baggage allowance.

The reason for the upmarket push is spelled out in the fine print: Allegiant and Sun Country are knitting themselves into a single leisure-travel group that already carries roughly 22 million passengers a year across more than 650 routes. A consistent onboard experience — a free drink here, a real premium seat there — is how you make two very different budget airlines feel like one brand.

The end of the bare fare?

Not quite. The base ticket is still bare, and the extras still add up. But the trend is unmistakable: the American ultra-low-cost carriers that built their brands on charging for every last thing are quietly reaching for the comforts of the legacy airlines they undercut. A free soda will not change anyone's fare, but it is a small signal that even the cheapest seat in the sky is getting a little more hospitable.

Sources: Allegiant Travel Company newsroom / PR Newswire; CAPA - Centre for Aviation; Runway Girl Network; LoyaltyLobby.

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