History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 21 August 1976, B-52s flew in from Guam with Phantom escorts. F-111s crossed the Pacific from Idaho. Fighters launched from Kadena, Clark, Osan and Taegu. South Korean F-5s and Sabres joined the stack. An aircraft carrier task force took station off...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
A submarine on the surface can see about five nautical miles. That is not a technology problem, it is a geometry problem: the lookout’s eyes are roughly five metres above the water and the earth curves away beneath him. The German admiralty considered several...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At half past four on the afternoon of 5 March 1944, a photographic officer landed at Lalaghat in Assam with a three-foot-square print under his arm and ninety minutes to spare. Captain Charles Russhon had flown over Burma that morning in a B-25 without telling the man...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations apart from the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air Force. A tailor had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon systems officer,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst Petersen, telegraphed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January 1968 they needed a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes where American...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews reported attacking...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a category of military aircraft that never fires a shot and decides the battle anyway. The Beriev A-50 is one of them: an Ilyushin Il-76 transport with a nine-metre radar dish bolted on top, fifteen people inside, and the ability to see six hundred kilometres...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to scrap. They became...
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