History & Legends, Military Aviation
Few aircraft state their purpose as plainly as the Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant. It was a barn with wings: a slab-sided freighter with a wingspan of 55.2 metres (181 ft 1 in), a nose that split open into clamshell doors, and a cargo hold eleven metres long into which...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL cargo crew...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft are remembered for a great victory. The Blackburn Firebrand is remembered for missing the war entirely. Conceived as a naval fighter, rebuilt as a torpedo carrier, and delivered only after the guns fell silent in 1945, it is one of British...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a few days in the autumn of 1953, the fastest aircraft on Earth was British, and it was called the Supermarine Swift. Then the same aircraft became one of the most embarrassing fighters the Royal Air Force ever bought. The Swift is the rare jet that set a world...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gloster Javelin was a first and a warning wrapped in one big delta wing. It was the Royal Air Force’s first purpose-built all-weather interceptor and Britain’s first delta-winged fighter — a genuinely modern machine for the early 1950s. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Britain’s second jet fighter was, in part, made of wood. It had two tail booms instead of one fuselage, an engine that sat behind the pilot like a barrel, and a plywood nose that traced its ancestry straight back to the Mosquito. It looked improvised. It was...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks, and haul them...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other German...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1941, a German engineer handed the Reich Air Ministry a several-hundred-page report describing a way to bomb New York from the edge of space. The weapon would be launched off a two-mile rail, rocket to the fringe of the atmosphere at some 24 times the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 9 July 1961, a huge four-engined jet thundered over the Tushino airfield near Moscow, flanked by two MiG-21s. Western observers craned their necks and reached for their notebooks. Here, it seemed, was proof that the Soviet Union had built a supersonic...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one aboard and no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet climbed at more than 3,600 metres per minute — so fast that Allied bomber crews, seeing it for the first time in the summer of 1944, could scarcely track it. In a single breathtaking arc it could reach the bombers, fire, and be...
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