Aviation World, History & Legends
Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet Atlantic is the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany chose it in 2022...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a stretch of forest...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1982, eight Soviet bombers came down on the USS Enterprise and USS Midway in the North Pacific and locked their radars on both carriers from about 190 kilometres out. The US Navy’s response was deliberately restrained, because watching how they...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is still in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would not have...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Four twin-engined transports fly line abreast, eighty metres apart, a hundred and fifty feet above the canopy. Behind each one a white plume spreads and settles into the trees. The run takes about four and a half minutes and covers sixteen kilometres. The crews called...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first with a real...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air combat between...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the SLUF. Short Little...
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