History & Legends, Military Aviation
By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other German...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat missions at all. He...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air nearly sixty...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1941, a German engineer handed the Reich Air Ministry a several-hundred-page report describing a way to bomb New York from the edge of space. The weapon would be launched off a two-mile rail, rocket to the fringe of the atmosphere at some 24 times the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Head-on, the Fairey Gannet looked like something a committee had argued about and lost. A deep, humpbacked fuselage, a chin full of radar, and a nose crowded with eight spinning propeller blades stacked in two counter-rotating discs. It is one of the most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 9 July 1961, a huge four-engined jet thundered over the Tushino airfield near Moscow, flanked by two MiG-21s. Western observers craned their necks and reached for their notebooks. Here, it seemed, was proof that the Soviet Union had built a supersonic...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
From the front it looked like the future: a big, twin-boom jet with a needle nose and no visible cockpit canopy where you would expect one. The de Havilland Sea Vixen was one of the most futuristic fighters the Royal Navy ever flew. It was also one of the deadliest...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 12 August 1944, a 29-year-old naval aviator climbed into a Liberator bomber that had been stripped of its guns and filled, wingtip to wingtip, with explosives. He did not have to be there. He had flown his tour and earned his ticket home. His name...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the 1950s the U.S. Navy watched the Air Force build a fleet of long-range bombers to carry the nation’s nuclear deterrent — and decided it wanted in. Its answer was one of the strangest and most beautiful warplanes America ever built: a swept-wing jet...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1943, a 33-year-old engineer promised the US Army Air Forces a jet fighter in 180 days. He rented a circus tent, pitched it beside a foul-smelling plastics factory in Burbank, sealed off a handful of hand-picked engineers, and delivered the XP-80 prototype in...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one aboard and no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. And for thirty years, when the weather closed in and the target sat hidden under cloud and darkness that grounded everything else, the US Navy sent the Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsonic, snub-nosed and...
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