History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured rather than built....
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Here’s something the U.S. Navy doesn’t put in the recruitment brochures: the hardest thing a naval aviator will ever do isn’t dogfighting, or dodging surface-to-air missiles, or threading a low-level attack run through a mountain valley. It’s...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Every fighter pilot trains for it. Most pray they’ll never experience it. The moment a jet engine — the machine that keeps you flying at 500 knots and 30,000 feet — stops working. Whether it’s a compressor stall that sounds like a cannon going off behind...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put bombs on it. For...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only place left for fuel...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if it ever crashed....
Aviation World, History & Legends
On November 2, 1947, the largest flying boat ever built lifted off the water of Long Beach Harbor, flew for about a mile at seventy feet, and never flew again. In that single minute, Howard Hughes won an argument that had nearly destroyed him. The Hughes H-4 Hercules...
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