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...
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,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twelve years on, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard is still missing. Not missing in the sense that nobody knows exactly where the wreck lies — missing in the sense that the largest and most expensive underwater search in history has now...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1933 Boeing built the aeroplane that made every other airliner in the world obsolete overnight. All-metal, cantilever low wing, retractable undercarriage, autopilot, de-icing boots, a heated and insulated cabin, and 189 miles an hour in cruise. It...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story At about twenty to eight on the evening of 15 May 1941, after a day of weather bad enough to keep everyone waiting, a small silver aeroplane with no propeller took off from RAF Cranwell and flew for seventeen minutes. It was not the first jet aircraft...
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