History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1982, eight Soviet bombers came down on the USS Enterprise and USS Midway in the North Pacific and locked their radars on both carriers from about 190 kilometres out. The US Navy’s response was deliberately restrained, because watching how they...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every elegant aircraft has an ungainly predecessor. Before the Hawker Siddeley Harrier hovered over Falklands task forces and Marine Corps flight decks, there was the Hawker P.1127: a stubby, bug-eyed prototype that looked less like a fighter than an experiment that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Before the Lancaster, before the B-17, before the very idea of a four-engined heavy bomber was settled doctrine, one already existed — and it was bombing London. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, built from 1916, was a four-engined biplane with a wingspan of 42.2...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 27 August 1939, over the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small, stub-nosed monoplane lifted off with a sound no one had heard from an aeroplane before: a rising, tearing howl in place of the familiar hammer of pistons. It was the Heinkel He...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late 1930s the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was, briefly, the most modern airliner in the sky: a clean, four-engined monoplane that could cross an ocean without stopping. Within three years the same graceful airframe was ranging far out over the Atlantic with bombs...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Stand near an Antonov An-22 as it runs up its engines and you do not just hear it, you feel it. Four of the most powerful turboprop engines ever built spin eight enormous propellers, each blade sweeping a circle taller than a house, and the sound is a deep, ripping...
Aviation World, History & Legends
No engine. No jet fuel. No rocket. Just a slender white sailplane, its long wings feeding on invisible rivers of rising air, climbing higher than a U-2 spy plane into the freezing black of the stratosphere. In 2018, the engineless Perlan 2 glider soared to 76,124 feet...
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