History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Long before the Predator, before the Reaper, before a single Hellfire was ever fired from an unmanned aircraft, a little jet-powered drone with a bug’s name was already flying spy missions over the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It is white, it is enormous, and it is faster than almost anything with a bomb bay. Russian crews call the Tupolev Tu-160 the “White Swan” for its pale anti-flash paint and its improbably graceful lines. The rest of the world knows it by...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Shooting down a ballistic missile with a laser sounds like science fiction. For a brief period around 2010, it was an American aircraft parked on a runway in California. The Boeing YAL-1 was a 747 with a megawatt-class laser built into its fuselage...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On paper, it should have worked. Take the superb Douglas Skyraider, replace its thundering piston engine with a modern turboprop of more than 5,000 horsepower, and the U.S. Navy would have a carrier attack aircraft faster and harder-hitting than...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Part 7 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. The Manhattan Project cost 1.9 billion dollars. The aircraft built to deliver its product cost three billion. This is the engineering story of the B-29 Superfortress — bought off the...
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