History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In September 1939, Poland went to war in the air flying gull-winged fighters that belonged to another decade. Yet in a hangar at Okęcie sat the aircraft that was supposed to change all that: the PZL.50 Jastrząb — the Hawk — a sleek,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Look quickly and you might call it a Sabre. Look again and the differences pile up: a fatter fuselage, twin-wheel landing gear, cannon in the nose, and — strangest of all — no air intake at the front. This was the North American YF-93, a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It looked like nothing else in the sky: a stubby twin-engine fighter whose nose stopped dead at the wing, as if someone had sawn the front off a normal aeroplane. Test pilots loved it. Comic-book readers worshipped it. And the U.S. Navy, after flying...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 6 August 1969, a Soviet helicopter lifted 40,204.5 kilograms — just over 40 tonnes — to a height of 2,255 metres. That is roughly the weight of a loaded articulated lorry, carried straight up by rotors. No helicopter has lifted more, before or...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story A jet aeroplane hovering ten feet above a runway is doing something aerodynamically absurd. There is no airflow over the wings, so the control surfaces do nothing. The only things keeping it upright are puffs of compressed air from nozzles at the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The trick she was best known for went like this: fly a biplane upside down, ten feet off the grass, and cut a ribbon strung between two poles with the propeller. The poles were held by Steve Wittman and Bill Brennan. On the first attempt the engine...
Recent Comments