Aviation World, History & Legends
Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in aviation history...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of aviation’s starkest...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and utterly outclassed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the theory was a dead end....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine hanging in space, five miles up, strapped into a single-seat jet that is not flying. It is dangling. Above your canopy, filling the entire sky, is the underside of the largest bomber the world has ever built, six propellers and four jets of it, roaring and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the summer of 1991, the Royal Air Force flew supersonic Tornados, was preparing for the Eurofighter, and had just watched stealth aircraft debut over Iraq. And the aircraft it relied on to spot incoming threats and guard the northern approaches to Britain was a...
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