History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story She was small, blonde and twenty-one, and she kept flowers in the cockpit. Not as a joke, not for a photograph — for herself. Somewhere over the churned earth of the Mius Front, in a Yak-1 with a pale lily painted near the nose, Lydia Litvyak...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Stand near an Antonov An-22 as it runs up its engines and you do not just hear it, you feel it. Four of the most powerful turboprop engines ever built spin eight enormous propellers, each blade sweeping a circle taller than a house, and the sound is a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 21 March 1999, two exhausted men brought a towering silver balloon down onto the Egyptian desert and stepped into the history books. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones had just done what pioneers had tried and failed to do for decades: fly all the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story No engine. No jet fuel. No rocket. Just a slender white sailplane, its long wings feeding on invisible rivers of rising air, climbing higher than a U-2 spy plane into the freezing black of the stratosphere. In 2018, the engineless Perlan 2 glider...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Boeing took its most famous creation, the mighty 747 “Jumbo Jet,” and did something almost sacrilegious: it sawed nearly 50 feet out of the middle. The result was a stubby, oddly proportioned jumbo that looked like a 747 caught in a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story By almost every technical measure, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar was the finest airliner of its generation. It could fly an approach and land itself in thick fog when rivals still needed a pilot’s hands. Its ride was smoother, its systems...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Look at an old airport photo from the 1970s and you will see it everywhere: a sleek jet with a tall T-tail and three engines clustered around its rear like the fletching on an arrow. This was the Boeing 727, and for a whole generation it was simply...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On a summer morning in 2024, thousands of people lined the shores of Vancouver Island to say goodbye to a 79-year-old giant. The Hawaii Mars, the largest flying boat still in the air anywhere in the world, lifted off the water one last time, escorted...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Most fighter jets are built to twist and turn. The MiG-31 Foxhound was built to do something far simpler and far more frightening: go very fast, in a straight line, and catch things nothing else could. Nearly half a century after its first flight, it...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the summer of 1940, outnumbered RAF fighter pilots kept turning up in exactly the right place to meet the Luftwaffe, again and again. To the Germans it looked like uncanny luck. It was nothing of the sort. Along the coast of Britain stood a line of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On a warm night in the summer of 1915, Londoners looked up from their blacked-out streets and heard something no city had ever heard before: the steady drone of engines coming out of the dark, high overhead. Moments later, bombs began to fall from a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the last spring of the Second World War, Dutch children ran into the open fields as British bombers roared overhead, not to hide, but to wave. Because these Lancasters were not carrying bombs. They were raining down bread, tinned meat and chocolate...
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