History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By the summer of 1944, London was under siege from a weapon no one could see coming until it was too late. The V-1 flying bomb — the “doodlebug” — buzzed across the Channel by the hundred, and its droning pulsejet was a sound Londoners learned to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Half a century ago, the SEPECAT Jaguar screamed across the plains of northern Germany at treetop height, a nuclear bomb slung beneath its belly and the Warsaw Pact in its sights. France retired it in 2005. Britain let it go in 2007. Oman parked its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 24 September 1958, a flight of Nationalist Chinese F-86 Sabres was climbing over the Taiwan Strait when a formation of Communist MiG-17s slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every so often a fighter comes along that wins its contest so completely that the argument simply stops. The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is that aircraft. It out-flew a rival prototype, rewrote what a fighter was supposed to do, and entered service as...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Dawn over Kadena, and the concrete is already trembling. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans spool up behind a jet the size of a small barn, the pilot walks the throttles into afterburner, and for a heartbeat the whole world is noise. Then the nose...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Most fighter pilots come up through the same narrow chute: flight school, a commission, a cockpit before they are old enough to rent a car without a surcharge. Kenneth Gilmore came up through a football program. Before he ever pulled Gs, he was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada high desert, a young American fighter pilot rolls into a turn and sees something that should not exist. A stubby, silver dart is sliding into formation off his wing — snub nose, sharp delta, a red star where a national...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Some Cold War weapons were terrifying. A few were beautiful. And then there was the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 — a machine that looked like a flying saucer had mated with a submarine, and was built, in all seriousness, to stalk and kill American nuclear...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Seen from the ground, it looked like an accident waiting to happen: a single-seat fighter — a Messerschmitt Bf 109 or a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 — bolted rigidly to the spine of a twin-engined Junkers Ju 88 bomber, the two machines climbing away as one...
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