History & Legends, Military Aviation
In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should have gone...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Look closely at the tail of the Spitfire and something is wrong — gloriously, deliberately wrong. Beside the familiar red-white-blue fin flash of the Royal Air Force sits a five-pointed communist red star. This is a British fighter, in British service, flying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. Before the Enola Gay could take off from Tinian, the bomb had to reach Tinian — and the ship that carried it never came home. This is the story of USS Indianapolis: the secret cargo, the twelve minutes, the four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. The Enola Gay needed a runway, and the runway needed an island. This is the story of Tinian — the Pacific speck that became, for one astonishing year, the largest airport on Earth. Sunset, Tinian, midsummer...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 9 flew the atomic missions; this piece goes back three months earlier, into the room where a handful of men decided which cities would live and which would die — and why the city at the top of the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine you are a fighter pilot who has just bailed out over a cold, heaving sea, far from land, with the enemy coast in sight. You are alone in the swell — until you hear engines, and a big, ungainly flying boat drops out of the sky, lands on the open ocean...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft are ugly and effective. A very few are beautiful and useless. The Republic XF-12 Rainbow was that rarest thing: an aeroplane so aerodynamically pure it looked sculpted — and so perfectly built for a mission that, by the time it flew, no longer...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1934, Americans looked up over Miami and saw something that made no sense: an aeroplane flying under what appeared to be a giant garden umbrella. It was not a stunt or a cartoon. It was the Nemeth Parasol, one of the strangest aircraft that ever actually left the...
Recent Comments