History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours, American depth...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
From the moment humans first left the ground, a certain kind of pilot has asked a dangerous question: what happens if I try this? The answers fill the wildest chapter of aviation history — a century of loops, rolls, dives and impossible threading of gaps, flown by men...
Aviation World, History & Legends
There is a sound a Lockheed P-38 Lightning makes that no other warbird can — two Allison V-12s, turbo-supercharged, humming in eerie harmony as the twin-boom fighter slides overhead. For most enthusiasts, hearing it once in a lifetime is a gift. This July at Oshkosh,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Tomorrow, as America’s 250th birthday flyovers thunder across the country, watch for the moment the crowd goes quiet. Four jets approach in perfect formation — and then one pulls up, streaming away from the others, climbing alone toward the vertical until...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 7 August 1942, over an island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in a fighter with no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 280 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic exile was about to...
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