History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the grey afternoon of 12 February 1942, six ancient-looking biplanes lumbered off the runway at RAF Manston, near Dover, and turned out over a freezing sea. They were Fairey Swordfish — fabric-and-wire torpedo bombers with open cockpits and a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The flies came first. On Malta in the baking summer of 1942, they swarmed everything, and they swarmed the thin slices of corned beef the fighter pilots of 249 Squadron ate between sorties. One newcomer had a trick. He would set his plate on the...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
Share this story It was meant to be an ordinary Saturday morning in southern Hungary. Instead, a light aircraft lifted off from the grass at Kalocsa with a man at the controls who had no business flying it, and pointed its nose toward the one place in the country...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When people list the great fighters of the Second World War, they name the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Bf 109, the Zero. They rarely mention the Macchi C.202 Folgore — and that is an injustice. In the right hands the sleek Italian fighter could...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every swing-wing jet that followed — the F-14 Tomcat, the F-111, the Tornado, the B-1 — owes a debt to one small, awkward and rather dangerous research aircraft from the early 1950s. The Bell X-5 was the first aeroplane in the world that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the evening of 10 May 1941, the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, alone, and pointed it at Scotland. No orders. No co-pilot. No authorisation from Hitler. Just Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It was a hard-luck bomber nobody wanted — a battered B-17E scarred by oddball accidents and passed from unit to unit until its tail number gave it a new name: Old 666. A misfit pilot named Jay Zeamer requisitioned the wreck, rebuilt it into a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Catapulting a jet that weighs as much as fifteen wartime Corsairs off a pitching carrier deck sounds like madness. For 35 years the US Navy did it routinely — with the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for...
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