History & Legends, Military Aviation
Seen from the ground, it looked like an accident waiting to happen: a single-seat fighter — a Messerschmitt Bf 109 or a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 — bolted rigidly to the spine of a twin-engined Junkers Ju 88 bomber, the two machines climbing away as one grotesque,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the 1950s the trend in military aircraft ran one way: bigger, heavier, more complex. Ed Heinemann ran the other way. When the U.S. Navy asked Douglas for a new jet attack aircraft and set a weight limit of 30,000 pounds, Heinemann came back with a design that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The problem was geometry. A German dam in 1943 was a wall of masonry more than a hundred feet thick at its base, protected by torpedo nets in the water and anti-aircraft guns on the crest. A bomb dropped from altitude would miss; a torpedo would snag the nets; a mine...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees something his...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power, and lumbered...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks above the green...
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