History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1925, somewhere in the American countryside, Willard Ray Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof clean off a barn. Most people would have seen a repair bill. Custer saw physics. The roof had not moved forward — yet it rose. He reasoned that lift did not...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was a little after ten on the night of 24 March 1944, and the pine woods of Lower Silesia were locked hard in frost. Some yards short of the tree line, the earth stirred, then opened. A head appeared, then a pair of shoulders in a made-over greatcoat, and a man...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1940, a young man from Iowa or California or Brooklyn would stand at a Canadian train station with a suitcase and a lie ready on his lips. He was not, officially, going to war. His government had made that illegal. Joining the armed forces of a nation...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the Philippine Sea at mid-morning on 19 June 1944. The water is glassy, the horizon hazed with heat, and 25,000 feet up a Grumman Hellcat pilot is watching a stain spread across the sky to the west. It is not weather. It is aircraft — dozens, then...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the 1930s, the most civilised way to cross a continent was aboard a vast, slow, four-engined biplane that looked like it belonged to the age of the Wright Brothers, and travelled at roughly the speed of a modern express train. The Handley Page HP.42 was the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Some aircraft look powerful. A few look beautiful. The Scaled Composites Proteus looks impossible, a spindly, insect-like machine of twin booms, stalky tandem wings and a slender pod, apparently held together by optimism. It seems far too fragile to fly. And yet this...
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