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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the night of Aug. 17, 1943, a rocket engineer named Wernher von Braun walked back to his quarters on a quiet stretch of the German Baltic coast and looked up. A full moon hung over the secret research town of Peenemünde. Then the first flares...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the morning of 25 October 1999, a small charter jet lifted off from Orlando bound for Dallas. It was an ordinary hop for six ordinary reasons, a golfer, his agents, a course designer, and two pilots, all with places to be. Within minutes, something...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 15 April 1969, a lumbering four-engine reconnaissance aircraft climbed away from a Japanese airfield on a mission its crew had flown, in one form or another, roughly 200 times in three months without incident. It was routine. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Above the Sea of Japan the air was thin and lethally cold, the clouds below him packed like dirty cotton. It was Royce Williams’ second flight of the day, 18 November 1952, and his Grumman Panther was clawing past 12,000 feet when the radio...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Decades before the V-22 Osprey, America built an aircraft that could lift off vertically like a helicopter, then cruise at over 400 mph like an airliner — by rotating its entire wing. It worked. It was decades ahead of its time. And almost...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of...
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