History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 30 May 1949, about 5,000 feet over Warwickshire, John Oliver Lancaster put an Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 into a shallow dive and the aircraft began to shake. Not a buffet — a violent asymmetric flutter of the elevons and wingtip fins, roughly one...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian’s...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The aeroplane was eleven years old and had been sitting around for a decade racking up about 990 hours under a string of previous owners. It was a 1953 Cessna 180 — a single-engine, tailwheel, four-seat lightplane of the sort that fills small-town...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 12 August 1976 a small blue-and-white jet lifted off from Venegono, north of Milan, with Aermacchi test pilot Franco Bonazzi at the controls. It was registered I-NOVE and it was not, by any measure, a revolutionary aeroplane. It was an old design...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
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