History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On a May morning in 1957, over the Pacific near Christmas Island, a Vickers Valiant called XD818 opened its bomb bay and released a device that fell away, dropped for long seconds, and then turned the sky white. Britain had just become a thermonuclear...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story France, the late 1950s. At SNECMA, engineers were building an aircraft with no wings you would recognise — no long span, no tail as anyone knew it, just a jet engine wrapped inside a great metal ring, designed to stand on its tail and rise straight...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the morning of 7 August 1919, Parisians near the Champs-Élysées heard an engine where there should have been none. They looked up to see a Nieuport fighter dropping toward the great arch at the head of the avenue — and then, impossibly, threading...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In August 1944, as Allied armies raced across France, a 52-year-old prisoner was put aboard a transport at Drancy bound for the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Vichy regime had already jailed him, together with his wife and children. Now the Nazis...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story At noon on 18 February 1944, the guards of Amiens prison sat down to lunch, as they did every day. Outside, snow lay deep across Picardy and the sky was a low grey ceiling. Inside the cruciform building, behind a three-and-a-half-metre perimeter wall,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Somewhere over central France in the late 1950s, test pilot André Turcat pushes a strange delta-winged aircraft past the speed where a normal jet engine begins to gasp for air. And that is when the Nord Griffon comes alive. Behind him, a ramjet the...
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