History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a beer keg with wings. Now bolt a nine-cylinder radial to the front, wedge a nervous pilot in behind it, and paint a red star on the side. Congratulations: you have just imagined the Polikarpov I-16, the stubbiest, twitchiest, most quietly revolutionary...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Picture grey water somewhere off the Alaskan coast in April 1924, fog sitting on it like a wet blanket. Four wooden biplanes on pontoons, engines hammering at a frequency that rattles your fillings, wallowing towards a horizon nobody in history has ever managed to fly...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Boeing took its most famous creation, the mighty 747 “Jumbo Jet,” and did something almost sacrilegious: it sawed nearly 50 feet out of the middle. The result was a stubby, oddly proportioned jumbo that looked like a 747 caught in a funhouse mirror, and it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Look at an old airport photo from the 1970s and you will see it everywhere: a sleek jet with a tall T-tail and three engines clustered around its rear like the fletching on an arrow. This was the Boeing 727, and for a whole generation it was simply what “an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most fighter jets are built to twist and turn. The MiG-31 Foxhound was built to do something far simpler and far more frightening: go very fast, in a straight line, and catch things nothing else could. Nearly half a century after its first flight, it is still the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a warm night in the summer of 1915, Londoners looked up from their blacked-out streets and heard something no city had ever heard before: the steady drone of engines coming out of the dark, high overhead. Moments later, bombs began to fall from a vast silver shape...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the night of Aug. 17, 1943, a rocket engineer named Wernher von Braun walked back to his quarters on a quiet stretch of the German Baltic coast and looked up. A full moon hung over the secret research town of Peenemünde. Then the first flares blossomed in the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football pitch, with a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 15 April 1969, a lumbering four-engine reconnaissance aircraft climbed away from a Japanese airfield on a mission its crew had flown, in one form or another, roughly 200 times in three months without incident. It was routine. It was rated minimal...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and killed the Avro Arrow...
Recent Comments