History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By 1952 the jet age had well and truly arrived. Swept-wing MiGs and Sabres were tearing across the skies of Korea at close to the speed of sound, and the propeller-driven fighter looked like a museum piece. Nobody told the Hawker Sea Fury. On a August...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 June 1994, a 250-ton bomber wheeled around the control tower at Fairchild Air Force Base in a bank no B-52 was ever meant to hold. The left wing kept dropping — past 60 degrees, past 90 — until the giant simply...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twenty minutes out of Memphis, First Officer Jim Tucker heard a sound he had never heard on an aeroplane: a metallic ring, again and again. It was a claw hammer coming down on the skull of his flight engineer. In the next few seconds a man would try...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 24 November 1944, a bombardier lay over his bombsight five and a half miles above Tokyo, cross-hairs settled on the Nakajima engine works, and watched his bombs miss by a mile. Not because his aim was bad — because something invisible had...
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