History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 June 1969, a North American B-25 Mitchell lifted off from Fairbanks, Alaska, lost an engine moments later, and came down wheels-up on a sandbar in the middle of the Tanana River. Everyone walked away. The bomber did not. Recovering it would have cost more than...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine strapping into a fighter, climbing to altitude, and then flying straight at a bomber whose gunners have been ordered to open fire on you. Not blanks. Not a camera. Real bullets, aimed at your aircraft, on purpose. Now imagine doing it two or three times a day...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1964, France joined the nuclear club on its own terms. Refusing to depend on American or British weapons, it built a sleek supersonic delta to carry its own bomb — a two-seat, twin-engined thoroughbred that could dash toward Moscow at twice the speed of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most Vietnam-era warplanes are long gone — melted into scrap or bolted to a museum pole. The OV-10 Bronco keeps refusing to leave. Built to fight guerrillas in the 1960s, the funny little twin-boom turboprop has come roaring back again and again: over the Mekong...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By a decades-old agreement between the U.S. services, the Army isn’t really supposed to fly its own combat aeroplanes — that job belongs to the Air Force. The Grumman OV-1 Mohawk is the great exception: a stubby, triple-tailed, bug-eyed turboprop built for...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no joke. It pulled...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave it an engine...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the Lerche —...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a warm Sunday afternoon in August 2024, a crimson-and-white flying boat the size of an airliner lifted off a lake on Vancouver Island for the last time. Tens of thousands of people lined the shore. Nine red Snowbirds jets slid into formation alongside her. And a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
A four-engine bomber the length of a swimming pool, painted brilliant white, rolls onto the runway. Its wings are stretched forward like a bird’s. Then four of the most powerful engines ever bolted to a warplane light their afterburners, and roughly 275 tonnes...
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