Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In August 1944, as Allied armies raced across France, a 52-year-old prisoner was put aboard a transport at Drancy bound for the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Vichy regime had already jailed him, together with his wife and children. Now the Nazis were deporting...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Four minutes after lifting off from Singapore Changi Airport on 4 November 2010, Qantas Flight 32 was climbing through 7,400 feet when the passengers heard it: a bang, then a second, heavier one that shuddered through the cabin. On the flight deck, Captain Richard de...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At noon on 18 February 1944, the guards of Amiens prison sat down to lunch, as they did every day. Outside, snow lay deep across Picardy and the sky was a low grey ceiling. Inside the cruciform building, behind a three-and-a-half-metre perimeter wall, were hundreds of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of Saturday, 27 October 1962, Major Rudolf “Rudy” Anderson Jr. was sealed into his pressure suit at McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida. He was not on the schedule that day — he had lobbied hard for the mission. It would be his sixth flight over...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind the wings, lying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them beside it. They...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours, American depth...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the Americans had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of Faro and came to...
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