History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell XP-67 is remembered for how it looked. Sleek, sculpted, every line flowing into the next, it was one of the most beautiful fighters of the Second World War — and one of the most tragic, because its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every fighter ever built was designed to fight — to turn, climb, chase and dodge. The Douglas F6D Missileer was designed to do none of those things. It was, quite deliberately, a fighter built never to dogfight: a big, slow, straight-winged aircraft that would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
When the United States cancelled its X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane in 1963, the idea did not die. It moved east. In the design bureau of Artem Mikoyan, Soviet engineers set out to build their own winged spacecraft — one that would ride a rocket toward orbit and then...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the nightmare that haunted American planners in the 1950s: radar picks up waves of Soviet bombers sweeping over the Arctic, each carrying a hydrogen bomb, and the only thing standing between them and American cities is a handful of interceptors that simply are...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was fat, slow, and so unlovely that the men who flew it simply called it “the Whale.” It set no speed records and never graced a recruiting poster. And yet the Douglas F3D Skyknight did something no glamorous day-fighter could claim: on a dark night...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1960, a young civilian test pilot named Neil Armstrong was quietly picked to fly into space — not in a capsule on top of a rocket, but in a winged glider that would ride a booster to orbit and then fly home to a runway like an aeroplane. The machine was...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looked like something bolted together in a shed: an open cockpit, fixed landing gear, a wing borrowed from a light aircraft. But the ungainly little Bell X-14 could do something almost nothing else in 1957 could — rise straight up off the ground, hover, tip...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Almost everyone can tell you that Chuck Yeager was first to break the sound barrier. Far fewer can name the man who first flew at twice the speed of sound. He was Scott Crossfield, and he did it on November 20, 1953, in a sleek, snow-white rocket plane called the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On September 27, 1956, Captain Milburn “Mel” Apt became the first human being to fly at three times the speed of sound. Minutes later he was dead. The Bell X-2 gave the world its first taste of Mach 3 and, on the very same flight, its first Mach 3 fatality...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For thirty-five summers, one of the most beloved sounds over the Swiss Alps was the deep, uneven drone of three radial engines and the sight of a corrugated metal skin catching the light. It was the Junkers Ju 52 — “Tante Ju,” Auntie Ju —...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1942, the odds facing an American bomber crew over Europe were close to a coin toss. The Eighth Air Force flew its heavy bombers by daylight, without enough fighter escort, straight into the teeth of German flak and fighters. Finishing a full tour of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a French airfield in 1916, you might have found two lion cubs named Whiskey and Soda padding between the tents, and a group of young Americans who had crossed an ocean to fight a war their own country had not yet joined. This was the Escadrille Lafayette —...
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