All Stories

During Bud Anderson's thirty-year career as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Air Force that spanned World War II and the Cold War, he was a fighter pilot, a combat and operational commander, a test pilot, and the leader of flight test programs.

Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick was 15 years old when she first jumped out of a hot air balloon with a parachute in 1908. Over the next 14 years she would make over 1,000 jumps, first out of balloons and then as the first woman to jump from an airplane.

Born in Weatherford, Oklahoma, to a dentist and a former schoolteacher on September 17, 1930, Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford (USAF) grew up under the first transcontinental airline route. As a child, he would watch silver DC-3s streak across the sky and think “I want to do that.”

Something was different about the class of astronaut candidates introduced in January 1990. Eighteen men and five women emerged from almost 2,500 applicants as Astronaut Group 13; seven were pilots and 16 were mission specialists. That was not unusual. The difference was that three of the women were military officers.

Where to see rare and even one-of-a-kind World War II airplanes. Many are closer than you think.

In World War II, military aviation came of age—leaving us with aeronautical masterpieces from both sides of the conflict.

Our curators talk about their favorite artifacts. The SR-71’s undeniable wow factor.

Pulling back the curtain on artifacts in storage.

In this Air and Space Quarterly exclusive, five U.S. Navy pilots who became the first American women to fly in combat tell their stories.

The Air and Space Quarterly Interview with F-4 aviator Porter Halyburton about his time as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.