History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the first months of the Pacific War, the Mitsubishi Zero was a nightmare. It could out-climb, out-turn and out-accelerate the stubby Grumman Wildcats the U.S. Navy sent against it, and American pilots who tried to fight it on its own terms — twisting, turning,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
To drop bombs on Tripoli for twelve minutes, the U.S. Air Force flew for thirteen hours. Not because the target was far in a straight line — it was a routine Mediterranean hop from bases in England — but because almost every ally in between refused to let the aircraft...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a week in the summer of 1976, more than a hundred people sat on the floor of a disused airport terminal in the heart of Africa, four thousand kilometres from home, and waited to find out whether they would be murdered. They had been separated — Israelis and Jews...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a quarter to eight on the morning of 5 June 1967, Egyptian air-defence officers were changing shifts, the dawn patrol had landed, and hundreds of Soviet-built fighters sat parked in neat rows across eighteen airfields. Within roughly three hours, most of them were...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The problem was geometry. A German dam in 1943 was a wall of masonry more than a hundred feet thick at its base, protected by torpedo nets in the water and anti-aircraft guns on the crest. A bomb dropped from altitude would miss; a torpedo would snag the nets; a mine...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
The most expensive gift in the history of aviation sat gleaming on the ramp in Turkey — and the President of the United States walked straight past it. On 8 July, barely a day after American bombs fell on Iran, Donald Trump boarded the old Air Force One, the...
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