Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And with that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit held only rudimentary instruments — an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator — and the controls to fire three solid-fuel rocket motors. There was no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath a Boeing B-50 Superfortress mothership,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
You know what a B-17 looks like. Four radial engines. The towering tail fin. Glass nose. Heavy-bomber Americana, stamped onto a thousand black-and-white photographs of the daylight raids over Germany. Now picture one with a fifth engine bolted to its nose — a giant...
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