History & Legends, Military Aviation
The sky over Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 belonged almost entirely to the attackers. Almost. While battleships burned and most American aircraft were destroyed on the ground, a handful of pilots managed to get airborne and fight back. The most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most fighter aces fight one enemy. Witold Urbanowicz fought two of history’s most feared air forces — the Luftwaffe over England and the Imperial Japanese over China — and beat them both. The Polish pilot did it while exiled from a homeland he would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He wore a cravat instead of a regulation tie, no rank insignia, and often a borrowed uniform. He nearly washed out of flight training. And yet Adrian “Warby” Warburton became the most decorated photo-reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air Force — the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1941, the biggest movie star to put on a uniform was not sent to make training films or sell war bonds — though the Army very much wanted him to. James Stewart, fresh off an Academy Award, wanted to fly bombers into Germany. And he had to fight his own...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Long before he invented Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory or the giant peach, Roald Dahl was lying in the Libyan desert with a fractured skull, blood in his eyes, and a burning biplane a few yards away. He was 24 years old, and he had just crash-landed a fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft are remembered for a great victory. The Blackburn Firebrand is remembered for missing the war entirely. Conceived as a naval fighter, rebuilt as a torpedo carrier, and delivered only after the guns fell silent in 1945, it is one of British...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Canada has designed exactly one fighter that went into mass production, and it was not the famous one. Everybody remembers the Avro Arrow, the beautiful Mach-2 interceptor that politics killed before it could serve. Almost nobody outside Canada remembers the homely,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a few days in the autumn of 1953, the fastest aircraft on Earth was British, and it was called the Supermarine Swift. Then the same aircraft became one of the most embarrassing fighters the Royal Air Force ever bought. The Swift is the rare jet that set a world...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gloster Javelin was a first and a warning wrapped in one big delta wing. It was the Royal Air Force’s first purpose-built all-weather interceptor and Britain’s first delta-winged fighter — a genuinely modern machine for the early 1950s. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Britain’s second jet fighter was, in part, made of wood. It had two tail booms instead of one fuselage, an engine that sat behind the pilot like a barrel, and a plywood nose that traced its ancestry straight back to the Mosquito. It looked improvised. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Line the Folland Gnat up next to almost any other jet fighter and it looks like a scale model that wandered onto the ramp by mistake. It is shorter than a Spitfire. A tall pilot practically wears it. And yet this pocket-sized British jet became the original mount of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, the richest man in America climbed into an unproven silver aircraft and took off alone, against the advice of everyone around him. Just over an hour later, Howard Hughes was lying in the burning wreckage of a Beverly Hills living room,...
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