History & Legends, Military Aviation
Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately, to pull a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Britain had been at war for three days. At quarter past six on the morning of 6 September 1939, a radar station on the Essex coast reported unidentified aircraft approaching at high altitude over West Mersea. There were no German aircraft. The plots were reflections...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On a Tuesday evening in September 1909, in the hills behind Piedmont, California, a Chinese machinist took off in a biplane he had designed, built and powered with an engine he had also built, and flew an elliptical circuit around a hilltop for about twenty minutes...
Aviation World, History & Legends
She had held a pilot’s licence for thirteen months and had forty hours of flying in her logbook, total. The aeroplane was a wood-and-fabric trainer with an eighty-horsepower rotary engine and a service ceiling of about 4,300 metres. Aconcagua, off to her right,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets. Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets behind their seats....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished. Seventeen men had been on board. A week later,...
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