Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
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