History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 24 November 1961, a machine that looked like somebody had bolted two helicopters to the wingtips of a transport aircraft lifted 16.4 tonnes to two and a half kilometres, set six world records in one flight, and landed thirty minutes later with its fuel warning...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the opening hours of...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The most important document in this story is a memo. It was written on 27 June 1972 by an engineer named Dan Applegate, it ran to a few pages, and it said clearly what was going to happen. Twenty months later it happened. Three hundred and forty-six people died in a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before take-off, and a fourth...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed when the aircraft...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Most aeroplanes are shaped by aerodynamics. The Short Skyvan was shaped by what would fit inside it. Short Brothers started from the cargo and worked outwards: a square-section fuselage of constant cross-section, running straight back to a full-width...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Inside the glider, in the dark, the tank crew sat in their tank with the engine running. The exhaust was ducted out through the side of the aircraft. When the glider stopped moving, the driver pulled a lanyard to release the shackles and drove...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Every flying boat is a compromise between two incompatible shapes. To get off the water you want a deep hull, to keep the propellers clear of spray, and a wing sitting at a high angle so it will unstick. To fly efficiently you want neither of those...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Somebody in the Soviet Ministry of Aircraft Industry decided that what agriculture needed was a jet. Not a jet trainer, not a jet transport. A jet crop-duster. A biplane one. The PZL M-15 Belphegor is the only jet-powered biplane ever put into series...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Junkers G.38 had a wing two metres thick at the root. Junkers, being Junkers, looked at that volume and decided it was a waste to fill it with nothing but structure. So they put passengers in it. On the second aircraft, six people sat inside the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they...
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