History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every helicopter engineer has the same dream: a machine that lifts straight up off a rooftop like a helicopter, then flies as fast as an aeroplane. The trouble is the rotor. It gives you vertical flight, but it also limits your speed — so what...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Imagine a fighter aircraft with four machine guns — and not one of them able to fire straight ahead. That was the Blackburn Roc. Its guns lived in a powered turret behind the pilot, so to shoot down an enemy the Roc had to fly alongside it, not...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 3 July 1955, Western military attachés stood at the Soviet Aviation Day display at Tushino, near Moscow, and watched something that frightened them: wave after wave of big four-jet bombers thundering overhead. They counted, and re-counted,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Tens of millions of people say his name every year without knowing whose it is. They say it at a check-in desk, on a boarding pass, in a taxi line in Chicago: O’Hare. Behind the world’s busiest departures board is a 27-year-old fighter...
Recent Comments