History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the 1930s the Atlantic was aviation’s unconquered ocean. Airships had crossed it, but no commercial heavier-than-air machine could carry paying cargo the whole way in a single hop. The physics was brutally simple: a flying boat heavy enough with fuel to reach...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For most of the last thirty years, the answer to “who builds America’s fighter jets?” was almost boringly simple. Lockheed Martin built the stealth fighters, and everyone else competed for what was left. Then, in the space of about two years, that...
Aviation World, History & Legends
For twenty years the Atlantic had been killing balloonists. Since 1958, five men had died trying to drift across it, and every attempt — more than a dozen of them — had ended in the sea. Then, in August 1978, three amateurs from Albuquerque climbed into a silver...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio station with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later, one of them would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some warplanes make their name in dogfights, twisting through the sky with guns blazing. The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo made most of its name doing the opposite: flying low, flying flat out, and flying completely unarmed straight over the people trying to kill it,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every so often aviation history throws up an aircraft whose greatest achievement was simply existing. The Bell P-59 Airacomet is the patron saint of that club. It was America’s first jet aircraft, a genuine milestone, and yet it was so underwhelming in the air...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to sit in any of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Ask anyone who was there and they will tell you the same thing: you heard it before you saw it. A low, chopping pulse rolling in over the treeline, whop-whop-whop, growing until it filled the whole sky. For a generation of soldiers, that sound meant almost everything...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aeroplanes are admired. A rare few are loved. The Hawker Hunter belongs firmly to the second category, and it has done so since the day it first slipped into the air in 1951. Ask a British pilot of a certain vintage to name the most beautiful jet ever built and...
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