History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Leading Aircraftman Leonard Fuller was 22 years old, three months into flight training, and had just been landed on by another aeroplane. Not hit. Landed on. The Avro Anson underneath him had driven its gun turret into his port wing root and stuck...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
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