Aviation World, History & Legends
Look at almost any small jet airliner of the 1960s and 1970s, the Douglas DC-9, the Boeing 727, the BAC One-Eleven, the Fokker F28, and you will see the same clever idea: the engines mounted at the tail, leaving the wing clean and the cabin quiet. That idea did not...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Imagine boarding a transatlantic flight, settling into your seat, and then, somewhere over the ocean, walking down a spiral staircase to a cocktail lounge for a drink and a hand of cards. That was not a fantasy in 1950. That was a Tuesday aboard the Boeing 377...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the mid-1980s, Beechcraft decided to leap a generation ahead of everyone else. It teamed up with Burt Rutan, the most imaginative aircraft designer alive, and built a business aeroplane that looked like it had flown in from the next century: an all-carbon-fibre...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In June 1941 the United States rolled out a bomber so large that a B-17 could have parked under one of its wings. The Douglas XB-19 spanned 212 feet, carried sleeping bunks and a kitchen for its relief crew, and was, for a time, the largest aircraft ever to fly in...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a freezing April night in 1978, a South Korean airliner full of sleeping passengers wandered a thousand miles off course, over one of the most secret corners of the Soviet Union, and was hit by an air-to-air missile. What happened next is one of the most...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the afternoon of 1 November 2011, a Boeing 767 slid down a runway at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport on its belly, spraying sparks and foam, with 231 people aboard and not a single wheel beneath it. When it stopped, everyone walked away. Some passengers did not even...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The story is irresistible: in the depths of the Second World War, a colossal six-engine German bomber slips across the Atlantic, flies to within sight of the Manhattan skyline, photographs Long Island, and turns for home before America ever knows it was there. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, and one of the most complete. Bigger, faster and longer-legged than the Mirage 2000 it grew from, the Dassault Mirage 4000 was France’s bid to build a true heavyweight, a twin-engine...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Long before the Tomahawk, and years before Polaris let a submarine fire a nuclear missile from beneath the waves, America’s first seagoing deterrent worked in the most nerve-wracking way imaginable. To shoot, the submarine had to surface in enemy waters, roll a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Just after dawn on October 25, 1944, lookouts on a cluster of small American ships off the island of Samar saw something that should not have been there: pagoda masts on the horizon. The most powerful surface fleet Japan could still put to sea — battleships led...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Twenty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set foot on the summit of Mount Everest, two men in open-cockpit biplanes looked down on it from above. On April 3, 1933, a small British expedition did something that sounds impossible for the technology of its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flying night missions over Europe began to see something they could not explain. Glowing balls of light, orange and red, would appear beside their aircraft and pace them through the dark, matching their turns, hanging...
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