Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Imagine a fighter aircraft with four machine guns — and not one of them able to fire straight ahead. That was the Blackburn Roc. Its guns lived in a powered turret behind the pilot, so to shoot down an enemy the Roc had to fly alongside it, not...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the early 1960s, a boxy little jet rose slowly off the ground at a Lockheed test site in Georgia, hung in the air, and set down again. On the face of it, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird had done the impossible-looking thing: vertical take-off on...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 3 July 1955, Western military attachés stood at the Soviet Aviation Day display at Tushino, near Moscow, and watched something that frightened them: wave after wave of big four-jet bombers thundering overhead. They counted, and re-counted,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 15 July 1941, a 28-year-old German pilot did something no one in the history of flight had done before: he shot down his hundredth aircraft. Werner Mölders had reached a number that once seemed impossible. Yet the record was not his most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Tens of millions of people say his name every year without knowing whose it is. They say it at a check-in desk, on a boarding pass, in a taxi line in Chicago: O’Hare. Behind the world’s busiest departures board is a 27-year-old fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the grey afternoon of 12 February 1942, six ancient-looking biplanes lumbered off the runway at RAF Manston, near Dover, and turned out over a freezing sea. They were Fairey Swordfish — fabric-and-wire torpedo bombers with open cockpits and a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The flies came first. On Malta in the baking summer of 1942, they swarmed everything, and they swarmed the thin slices of corned beef the fighter pilots of 249 Squadron ate between sorties. One newcomer had a trick. He would set his plate on the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When people list the great fighters of the Second World War, they name the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Bf 109, the Zero. They rarely mention the Macchi C.202 Folgore — and that is an injustice. In the right hands the sleek Italian fighter could...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every swing-wing jet that followed — the F-14 Tomcat, the F-111, the Tornado, the B-1 — owes a debt to one small, awkward and rather dangerous research aircraft from the early 1950s. The Bell X-5 was the first aeroplane in the world that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945,...
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