History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every flying boat is a compromise between two incompatible shapes. To get off the water you want a deep hull, to keep the propellers clear of spray, and a wing sitting at a high angle so it will unstick. To fly efficiently you want neither of those...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Pacific is the largest single feature on the planet. In 1928 nobody had flown across it, and the reason was arithmetic: the distances between usable landfalls were longer than any aircraft could reliably manage, and if you missed the island you...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1926 an oilfield roughneck in Oklahoma took a metal splinter in his left eye and lost it. Seven years later, the same man flew around the world on his own in under eight days, and then went looking for the edge of the atmosphere. Wiley Post had one...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF’s great four-engine heavy bombers — into service before the Halifax, before the Lancaster, the aircraft that opened Britain’s strategic bombing war. It was huge, handsome and, in the end,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1935 a newspaper baron dared British industry to build the fastest civil aircraft in Europe. The result was so quick that when the Royal Air Force turned it into a bomber, it could outrun its own fighters. Two years later that same design flew the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Blackburn Skua was slow, awkward and asked to do two jobs it could not both do well. It has been mocked ever since as one of the Fleet Air Arm’s worst fighters. And yet in the first months of the Second World War this unloved machine scored...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Nobody ever called the Fairey Barracuda beautiful. With its high shoulder-mounted wing, spindly legs and a clutter of struts and flaps hanging beneath it, the Fleet Air Arm’s torpedo and dive bomber looked like it had been assembled from spare...
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