Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
It may be the most beautiful aircraft the United States Navy ever sent to sea: long, impossibly sleek, twin-finned and built to sprint at twice the speed of sound off a carrier deck. The North American A-5 Vigilante looked like it had arrived from a decade in the...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the 1950s the trend in military aircraft ran one way: bigger, heavier, more complex. Ed Heinemann ran the other way. When the U.S. Navy asked Douglas for a new jet attack aircraft and set a weight limit of 30,000 pounds, Heinemann came back with a design that...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
The most expensive gift in the history of aviation sat gleaming on the ramp in Turkey — and the President of the United States walked straight past it. On 8 July, barely a day after American bombs fell on Iran, Donald Trump boarded the old Air Force One, the...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur, 23 September 1913, 5:47 in the morning. The sea is still grey, the air smells of salt and the burnt castor oil that every rotary engine of the era coughs over its pilot. A small, dark-eyed man settles into a Morane-Saulnier G — a...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Gate 15 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few minutes past midnight on the last day of August 1983. A Boeing 747 sits in the floodlights, doors open, while 246 passengers file aboard: businessmen bound for Taipei and Hong Kong, honeymooners, grandparents,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Just before midnight on 1 July 2002, two aircraft converged over the Bodensee at 36,000 feet. One was a DHL Boeing 757 freighter climbing out of Bergamo with two pilots aboard. The other was a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 carrying 69 people from Moscow toward a...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
When the An-225 Mriya was destroyed in 2022, the world lost its single largest aircraft. But the West still keeps a giant of its own in the air — one that has been hauling tanks, helicopters and satellites around the planet since before the Moon landings, and is...
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