History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the middle of the Second World War, one of the most famous psychologists in America proposed a guidance system for bombs that used no radar, no gyroscopes, and no vacuum tubes. It used pigeons. Live ones. Riding inside the nose of the bomb.The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. The Enola Gay needed a runway, and the runway needed an island. This is the story of Tinian — the Pacific speck that became, for one astonishing year, the largest airport on Earth. Sunset,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Some aircraft are ugly and effective. A very few are beautiful and useless. The Republic XF-12 Rainbow was that rarest thing: an aeroplane so aerodynamically pure it looked sculpted — and so perfectly built for a mission that, by the time it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1934, Americans looked up over Miami and saw something that made no sense: an aeroplane flying under what appeared to be a giant garden umbrella. It was not a stunt or a cartoon. It was the Nemeth Parasol, one of the strangest aircraft that ever...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the spring of 1942, young American pilots training in Florida had a grim joke about the sleek new bomber they were learning to fly: “one a day in Tampa Bay.” It was barely an exaggeration. The Martin B-26 Marauder was killing its own...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Every time you settle into an airliner seat at 35,000 feet, sealed comfortably against air so thin and cold it would kill you in minutes, you are enjoying an idea that first flew on the last day of 1938. Its name was the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story German fighter pilots had a name for the big four-engined British flying boat they kept meeting over the Atlantic: the Fliegendes Stachelschwein — the “flying porcupine.” They earned that respect the hard way. Attacking a lone Short...
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