Cessna T-37 Tweet, Screaming Jet That Trained Generations
Every pilot who trained on it remembers the sound before the shape. Long before you saw the stubby little jet taxi out, you heard it: a shriek so piercing it seemed to drill straight through your skull. Ground crews had a name for the Cessna T-37 that said it all....
Fouga Magister, Butterfly-Tailed Jet That Went to War
On the morning of 5 June 1967, a handful of little French-built trainers lifted off from Israeli airfields on what looked like a routine sortie. Within hours they were diving on armour in the Sinai. The Fouga Magister, a jet designed to teach teenagers to fly, had...
Canadair CL-84 Dynavert Tilt-Wing Gamble
Picture a fat-bodied transport sitting on a Montreal ramp in 1965, engines spun up, and then the whole wing hinging skyward until the propellers point at the clouds. The aircraft rises straight up, hangs in the air, and then the wing tilts forward again until it is...
The First Blackhawk Was a Record-Breaking Gunship
Before the UH-60 wore the name, there was another Blackhawk, and it was a snarling gunship. The Sikorsky S-67 first flew on 20 August 1970, a sleek, low-slung attack helicopter built entirely on Sikorsky’s own money in a frantic nine-month sprint. Be clear from...
Lockheed’s 240 mph Gunship the Army Feared
At an airshow in December 1967, the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne did something helicopters were not supposed to do. It bowed. Landing on its two forward wheels, it dipped its nose to the crowd, then gently set its tail down and taxied away. The trick was the pusher...
Soviet Supersonic Jump Jet Hidden Inside the F-35B
On a carrier deck in the northern autumn of 1991, a fighter unlike anything in the West rose straight up on pillars of flame, rotated its tail nozzle back to level, and accelerated away past the speed of sound. This was the Yakovlev Yak-141, NATO codename Freestyle:...
Northrop’s Magnesium Flying Wing That Never Fought
Roll it out onto the sun-bleached hardpan at Muroc in 1943 and the Northrop XP-56 looked less like a fighter than a dark, headless projectile. There was almost no tail, no nose propeller, and a fat belly fin slicing the desert air. Jack Northrop called it the Black...
Scimitar: Royal Navy’s Swept-Wing Bruiser
When the Supermarine Scimitar first crashed onto a carrier deck in 1958, it arrived as the biggest, heaviest and most powerful aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had ever tried to operate from a ship. Twin Rolls-Royce Avons gave it such brutal thrust that a pilot could stand...
MiG-19 Farmer: Soviet Supersonic First
On 3 July 1955, forty-eight identical swept-wing jets thundered over Tushino airfield outside Moscow in a single roaring formation. Western observers at the airshow did the arithmetic and felt a chill: the Soviet Union had just fielded its first supersonic fighter in...
F9F Panther: Grumman’s Korean War Jet Cat
On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it belonged to a stubby,...
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