Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the early 1960s, two American giants owned the jet age: Boeing’s 707 and the Douglas DC-8. Convair, a division of General Dynamics, decided it could not out-size them — so it tried to out-run them.The result was the Convair 990...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Doug White was having the worst week of his life. He, his wife Terri and their two daughters were flying home to Louisiana from Florida, where they had just buried his brother. It was Easter Sunday, 2009. White, a 56-year-old private pilot who had...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 08:47 on the morning of 27 December 1991, a nearly new SAS MD-81 lifted off from a frozen Stockholm-Arlanda. It had sat out the night in near-freezing air with cold fuel chilling its wings, and a layer of clear ice — invisible, glass-smooth...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By 1942 Eddie Rickenbacker had already cheated death more times than most men attempt it. He was America’s “Ace of Aces” from the First World War, a former Indianapolis 500 racer, and the hard-driving boss of Eastern Air Lines. He...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 May 1988, a nearly new Boeing 737-300 was threading between thunderstorm cells on approach to New Orleans. In the left seat sat Captain Carlos Dárdano — twenty-nine years old, and flying with one eye, the other lost...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On paper, the Yakovlev Yak-38 looked like Moscow’s answer to the Harrier: a jet that could rise straight off a deck with no catapult, hover, and land vertically. In practice it was one of the most compromised combat aircraft of the Cold War.The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Before dawn on New Year’s Day 1945, while much of the Allied camp slept off its celebrations, hundreds of German fighters lifted off in near-total silence. No radios. Incomplete maps. Pilots who, in many cases, had been told only minutes earlier...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story He was twenty-one, a copper miner’s son from Phoenix with a boxer’s swagger and a habit of ignoring orders. In the last September of the First World War, Second Lieutenant Frank Luke Jr. turned himself into the most feared balloon-hunter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Grumman built the F8F Bearcat around one brutal idea: take the biggest engine America had and wrap the smallest possible aeroplane around it. The result was less a fighter than an engine with a saddle — an 18-cylinder radial hauling a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 21 September 1953, a flight line at Kimpo Air Base watched a swept-wing jet swing onto the approach and took it for one of their own F-86 Sabres. It wasn’t. It was a Soviet-built MiG-15, still wearing North Korean red stars,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On Christmas Eve 1944, American troops dug in near Liège heard something wrong in the sky. Not the familiar growl of piston engines, but a smooth, piercing roar. Sleek aircraft swept overhead, dropped their bombs, and simply accelerated away....
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