Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Look quickly and you might call it a Sabre. Look again and the differences pile up: a fatter fuselage, twin-wheel landing gear, cannon in the nose, and — strangest of all — no air intake at the front. This was the North American YF-93, a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 6 August 1969, a Soviet helicopter lifted 40,204.5 kilograms — just over 40 tonnes — to a height of 2,255 metres. That is roughly the weight of a loaded articulated lorry, carried straight up by rotors. No helicopter has lifted more, before or...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story A jet aeroplane hovering ten feet above a runway is doing something aerodynamically absurd. There is no airflow over the wings, so the control surfaces do nothing. The only things keeping it upright are puffs of compressed air from nozzles at the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian’s...
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