Aermacchi MB-326, Italy’s Globe-Trotting Jet Trainer
Share this story In the mid-1950s, a defeated and rebuilding Italy could not afford to chase supersonic fighters. So one Macchi engineer, Ermanno Bazzocchi, aimed lower and smarter. His compact single-engine trainer would go on to fly in the colours of more than ten...
Cessna T-37 Tweet, Screaming Jet That Trained Generations
Share this story Every pilot who trained on it remembers the sound before the shape. Long before you saw the stubby little jet taxi out, you heard it: a shriek so piercing it seemed to drill straight through your skull. Ground crews had a name for the Cessna T-37 that...
Fouga Magister, Butterfly-Tailed Jet That Went to War
Share this story On the morning of 5 June 1967, a handful of little French-built trainers lifted off from Israeli airfields on what looked like a routine sortie. Within hours they were diving on armour in the Sinai. The Fouga Magister, a jet designed to teach...
Canadair CL-84 Dynavert Tilt-Wing Gamble
Share this story Picture a fat-bodied transport sitting on a Montreal ramp in 1965, engines spun up, and then the whole wing hinging skyward until the propellers point at the clouds. The aircraft rises straight up, hangs in the air, and then the wing tilts forward...
The First Blackhawk Was a Record-Breaking Gunship
Share this story Before the UH-60 wore the name, there was another Blackhawk, and it was a snarling gunship. The Sikorsky S-67 first flew on 20 August 1970, a sleek, low-slung attack helicopter built entirely on Sikorsky’s own money in a frantic nine-month...
Lockheed’s 240 mph Gunship the Army Feared
Share this story At an airshow in December 1967, the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne did something helicopters were not supposed to do. It bowed. Landing on its two forward wheels, it dipped its nose to the crowd, then gently set its tail down and taxied away. The trick was...
Soviet Supersonic Jump Jet Hidden Inside the F-35B
Share this story On a carrier deck in the northern autumn of 1991, a fighter unlike anything in the West rose straight up on pillars of flame, rotated its tail nozzle back to level, and accelerated away past the speed of sound. This was the Yakovlev Yak-141, NATO...
Northrop’s Magnesium Flying Wing That Never Fought
Share this story Roll it out onto the sun-bleached hardpan at Muroc in 1943 and the Northrop XP-56 looked less like a fighter than a dark, headless projectile. There was almost no tail, no nose propeller, and a fat belly fin slicing the desert air. Jack Northrop...
Scimitar: Royal Navy’s Swept-Wing Bruiser
Share this story When the Supermarine Scimitar first crashed onto a carrier deck in 1958, it arrived as the biggest, heaviest and most powerful aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had ever tried to operate from a ship. Twin Rolls-Royce Avons gave it such brutal thrust that a...
MiG-19 Farmer: Soviet Supersonic First
Share this story On 3 July 1955, forty-eight identical swept-wing jets thundered over Tushino airfield outside Moscow in a single roaring formation. Western observers at the airshow did the arithmetic and felt a chill: the Soviet Union had just fielded its first...
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