History & Legends, Military Aviation
Before dawn on 1 August 1943, the desert around Benghazi coughed itself awake. One hundred and seventy-eight B-24 Liberators, engines scoured half to death by Libyan sand, staggered off the runways with 3,100 US gallons (11,700 litres) of fuel and full bomb bays. More...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur, 23 September 1913, 5:47 in the morning. The sea is still grey, the air smells of salt and the burnt castor oil that every rotary engine of the era coughs over its pilot. A small, dark-eyed man settles into a Morane-Saulnier G — a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees something his...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Gate 15 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few minutes past midnight on the last day of August 1983. A Boeing 747 sits in the floodlights, doors open, while 246 passengers file aboard: businessmen bound for Taipei and Hong Kong, honeymooners, grandparents,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power, and lumbered...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Just before midnight on 1 July 2002, two aircraft converged over the Bodensee at 36,000 feet. One was a DHL Boeing 757 freighter climbing out of Bergamo with two pilots aboard. The other was a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 carrying 69 people from Moscow toward a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky, foreign parachutists...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard, rolling straight...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks above the green...
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