History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The men who joined the most exclusive club in the world had all paid the same terrible entrance fee: they had been burned, often beyond recognition, in the cockpits of burning aircraft. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because the surgery...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The trick she was best known for went like this: fly a biplane upside down, ten feet off the grass, and cut a ribbon strung between two poles with the propeller. The poles were held by Steve Wittman and Bill Brennan. On the first attempt the engine...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The aeroplane was eleven years old and had been sitting around for a decade racking up about 990 hours under a string of previous owners. It was a 1953 Cessna 180 — a single-engine, tailwheel, four-seat lightplane of the sort that fills small-town...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 11:24 on the morning of 14 August 2005, a Greek Air Force F-16 pilot pulled alongside a Boeing 737 orbiting quietly over the Aegean and looked into the cockpit. The first officer was slumped motionless in his seat. The captain’s seat was...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twelve minutes after leaving Tokyo on the evening of 12 August 1985, the rear pressure bulkhead of a Boeing 747 gave way. The escaping air blew off most of the vertical stabiliser and severed all four hydraulic systems. The crew were left with an...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Two minutes and thirty-three seconds passed between the moment an Airbus A310 stopped doing what its crew believed it was doing, and the moment it hit a hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau. Seventy-five people died. The story is usually told as a simple...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The raid was supposed to take thirty minutes. Sixteen helicopters, a four-minute flight, two Somali commanders lifted out of a building near the Olympic Hotel, and home. What happened instead ran for seventeen hours and cost eighteen American lives,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story At two minutes past noon on 21 February 1973, the co-pilot of a Libyan Boeing 727 told air traffic control in Cairo that he was ten miles out and ready to descend. He was a hundred and five miles away, in the wrong country, with two Israeli Phantoms...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was...
Recent Comments