History & Legends, Military Aviation
At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed when the aircraft...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the night of 30 March 1944, RAF Bomber Command sent 795 heavy bombers to Nuremberg. Ninety-six of them never came home. In a single night, in a few hours over Germany, more than 500 young airmen were killed — the worst night the Command...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 21 March 1945, twenty de Havilland Mosquitos came in over Copenhagen at rooftop height, so low that Danes on the streets could see the crews’ faces. Their target was the Shellhus — the Gestapo’s headquarters in the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Late in the afternoon of April 18, 1943 — Palm Sunday — a wall of German transport planes crawled north-east across the Mediterranean at wavetop height, so low their propellers kicked spray off the swells. There were about ninety of them,...
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