Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
Share this story 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...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story 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,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story 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...
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
There are big aircraft, and then there was the Mriya. Stand under a Boeing 747 and you feel small. Stand under an An-225 and the 747 starts to look like the small one. For 33 years exactly one of these machines existed — a six-engined Soviet giant built for a single,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico...
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