Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
Share this story The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Share this story From the air it looks like a filing system for aeroplanes. Row upon row of them, wingtip to wingtip, laid out across ten square kilometres of Arizona desert in lines so straight they look drawn. Bombers here. Fighters there. Transports over there....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Earlier this year the RAF’s first E-7 Wedgetail spent a period at a Wiltshire airfield most people have never heard of, having its systems activated and its radar calibrated, before it was allowed anywhere near an operational squadron. That is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every bomb ever built before 1944 was designed to hit the thing it was aimed at. Barnes Wallis built two that were designed to land next to it. This was not a compromise or an admission that bombing was inaccurate. It was the entire principle. Wallis...
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