Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Picture a man leaning out of an open cockpit in a powder-blue military tunic he designed himself, a waxed moustache curling at the tips, waving to the crowd — and cradling a live lion cub in the crook of his arm. That was Roscoe Turner, and in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Grumman set out to build the finest carrier fighter of the Second World War: a twin-engine brute that could outrun and outgun anything in the sky and haul a bomber’s worth of ordnance off a flight deck. It succeeded. The Tigercat was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Somewhere under the muddy shallows of Wassaw Sound, off the coast of Georgia, sits a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb. The United States Air Force dropped it there in 1958, searched for ten weeks, gave up, and has left it alone ever since. It is one of a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Shortly after 11 a.m. on 16 August 1942, a sagging, half-deflated US Navy blimp came drifting low over the rooftops of Daly City, California, snagging telephone wires as a crowd chased it through the streets. It finally sank onto the pavement in front...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story He had one eye, a sixth-grade education and a criminal record. He was also, by any honest measure, one of the greatest pilots who ever lived. Wiley Post circled the planet alone before most people had ever sat in an aeroplane, built the suit that made...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the evening of 4 September 1936, a turquoise-and-silver monoplane lifted off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and turned out over the Atlantic, into the dark and into the wind. At the controls, alone, was a 33-year-old woman who had never flown the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Two months after a Soviet missile knocked Gary Powers and his U-2 out of the sky, another American aircraft was hunting the edges of the same empire. On 1 July 1960, a Boeing RB-47H was flying a lonely electronic-reconnaissance mission high over the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Curtiss was once one of the giants of American aviation. It built the fighters that fought the First World War, the racing seaplanes that set world records in the 1920s, and the P-40 Warhawks whose shark-mouthed noses became a symbol of the Second...
Recent Comments