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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 3:46 in the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1935, a four-engined flying boat lifted off the water at Alameda, California, and set course west across an ocean that no aeroplane had ever crossed on a schedule. Around twenty thousand people were...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1937 Focke-Wulf flew a fighter that was roughly 80 km/h faster than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 then in service, using exactly the same engines. It had twice the range. It weighed twice as much and still outran the thing it was compared against. Nine...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Put two engines in a fighter and you normally end up with something like a Bf 110: two nacelles, one on each wing, and an aeroplane that is bigger than the thing it is trying to shoot down. Kawasaki tried a different answer. They put one engine in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every helicopter pilot knows the problem with ejecting from a helicopter. Above your head, turning at several hundred revolutions per minute, are the blades. Fire yourself upwards and you go through them. Which is why, in more than a century of rotary...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the night of 21 September 1993, a decorated Soviet combat pilot climbed onto the podium of the Russian parliament and, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, swore himself in as President of Russia. Five years earlier, the same man had been hanging...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in...
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