Share this story The Junkers G.38 had a wing two metres thick at the root. Junkers, being Junkers, looked at that volume and decided it was a waste to fill it with nothing but structure. So they put passengers in it. On the second aircraft, six people sat inside the...
Share this story Look at a Blohm & Voss BV 141 head-on and your brain files a complaint. The engine and the tail are on the left. The crew sit in a glass pod on the right. There is no fuselage in the middle, because there is no middle. It looks like two different...
Share this story On 2 June 1944, B-17s of the Fifteenth Air Force bombed marshalling yards in Hungary and then kept going east. They landed in Ukraine, at three Soviet airfields the Red Army had handed over to the Americans. It was the first time in the war that a...
Share this story Ukraine spent three years learning how to shoot down Shaheds cheaply. Machine guns on pickup trucks. Electronic warfare. Then, cleverest of all, small propeller-driven interceptor drones that cost a few thousand dollars and rammed a target worth far...
Share this story When Soviet-built MiG-15s came screaming over Korea in late 1950 with their swept wings and steep climb, the United States Navy had a problem. Its best carrier jet, the Grumman F9F Panther, was a fine, sturdy machine — but its straight wing...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States lay awake at night worrying about Soviet bombers slipping across the Arctic in the dark. The aircraft it scrambled to meet them was the Lockheed F-94 Starfire — the first American jet fighter with an...
Share this story Some aircraft are cancelled because they fail. The Douglas F5D Skylancer was cancelled because it was too good, too late, and built by the wrong company. It went supersonic on its very first flight, handled beautifully, and impressed every pilot who...
Share this story Take an F-16 Fighting Falcon, throw away its wing, and bolt on a vast cranked-arrow delta that nearly doubles its area. Stretch the fuselage, cram in 65 percent more fuel, and hang bombs from twenty-seven stations. What you get flies farther, carries...
Share this story When the Grumman X-29 stunned airshow crowds in the 1980s with wings that swept the wrong way, and again when Russia rolled out the Su-47 Berkut, both were hailed as radical leaps. Neither was first. A German bomber had already flown on forward-swept...
Share this story For most of a century, an airliner was a machine made of aluminium — hundreds of thousands of sheets, frames and rivets bolted into a metal tube. Then Boeing rolled out the 787 Dreamliner, and the industry’s most fundamental building...
Share this story You cannot see it, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Behind every aircraft that is making lift trail two invisible tornadoes of spinning air — wake turbulence. Fly into the wake of a big jet at the wrong moment and a smaller aircraft...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Recent Comments