Aviation World, History & Legends
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 funhouse mirror, and it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 cleverer, its safety...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 what “an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 by the Canadian...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 is still the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 tall steel...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 vast silver shape...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 on a nation that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 blossomed in the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 went quietly and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 pitch, with a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 rated minimal...
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