History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell F3H Demon is remembered for what it led to. Underpowered, dangerous in its early years, and saddled with one of the worst engines in naval-aviation history, the Demon nonetheless taught its...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Before he was a reclusive billionaire, before the movies and the mania, Howard Hughes was a young man obsessed with going fast. In 1935 that obsession took the shape of a single, gorgeous silver aeroplane — the Hughes H-1 Racer — and with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Most warplanes of the 1950s are museum pieces or scrap. The Xian H-6 is neither. Nearly seventy years after its Soviet ancestor first flew, China is still building, flying, and continually re-arming this jet — and the latest versions are among...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force wanted a single machine that could climb fast, find a Soviet bomber on its own radar, and kill it with a bay full of missiles before it reached an American city. The answer was the F-102 Delta Dagger — the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1949 the Swedish Air Force asked for something that did not exist anywhere in the world: an interceptor capable of Mach 1.4 to 1.5, able to operate from dispersed road bases, to meet a Soviet bomber threat crossing the Baltic.Saab’s answer...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story There is an aeroplane in the Cold War Gallery at Dayton that the museum has deliberately not restored. Its wings are off. Its nose is crushed. The paint is scorched.The Lockheed XF-90 lost its competition, never entered production, and was officially...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every helicopter engineer has the same dream: a machine that lifts straight up off a rooftop like a helicopter, then flies as fast as an aeroplane. The trouble is the rotor. It gives you vertical flight, but it also limits your speed — so what...
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