Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story For as long as there have been cars and aeroplanes, people have wanted to combine them. Almost everyone who tried, failed. But one man actually did it: he built a flying car that flew, that drove, that carried passengers, and that a government safety...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1934, an Australian chocolate millionaire offered a fortune to whoever could fly fastest from England to Melbourne — nearly 11,000 miles across deserts, jungles and oceans. Airliners of the day could not come close. So de Havilland built...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Picture the nightmare that haunted American planners in the 1950s: radar picks up waves of Soviet bombers sweeping over the Arctic, each carrying a hydrogen bomb, and the only thing standing between them and American cities is a handful of...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story You have almost certainly seen this crash, even if you have never heard of the aircraft. A stubby, wingless machine tumbles end over end across a desert lakebed, throwing up a cloud of dust, and comes to rest upside down. For millions of people, that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1960, a young civilian test pilot named Neil Armstrong was quietly picked to fly into space — not in a capsule on top of a rocket, but in a winged glider that would ride a booster to orbit and then fly home to a runway like an aeroplane. The...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It looked like something bolted together in a shed: an open cockpit, fixed landing gear, a wing borrowed from a light aircraft. But the ungainly little Bell X-14 could do something almost nothing else in 1957 could — rise straight up off the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On September 27, 1956, Captain Milburn “Mel” Apt became the first human being to fly at three times the speed of sound. Minutes later he was dead. The Bell X-2 gave the world its first taste of Mach 3 and, on the very same flight, its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story You could identify it from the ground before you could hear it: two long booms, a pod slung between them, and a wing that seemed to float without a fuselage behind it. Nothing else in the sky of 1942 looked remotely like the P-38 Lightning —...
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