History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the middle of the Second World War, one of the most famous psychologists in America proposed a guidance system for bombs that used no radar, no gyroscopes, and no vacuum tubes. It used pigeons. Live ones. Riding inside the nose of the bomb.The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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,...
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