Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word...
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 Five years ago this month, a US Marine Corps F-35B took off from a British aircraft carrier, landed on an American assault ship, took on fuel and weapons, and flew off again to attack a second set of targets. The Marine Corps called it the first time...
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,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1933 Boeing built the aeroplane that made every other airliner in the world obsolete overnight. All-metal, cantilever low wing, retractable undercarriage, autopilot, de-icing boots, a heated and insulated cabin, and 189 miles an hour in cruise. It...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story At about twenty to eight on the evening of 15 May 1941, after a day of weather bad enough to keep everyone waiting, a small silver aeroplane with no propeller took off from RAF Cranwell and flew for seventeen minutes. It was not the first jet aircraft...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story An Airbus A330 of that weight should touch down at about 135 knots. On 13 April 2010, Cathay Pacific 780 arrived at Hong Kong at 231 knots — with both thrust levers at idle, one engine stuck at seventy percent power, the other stuck below idle,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Everybody who knows anything about the Antonov An-2 knows the same thing about it: that the flight manual has no stall speed, and that if the engine quits you simply hold the stick back and the aeroplane parachutes gently to earth at 40 km/h. It is a...
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...
Recent Comments