History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the autumn of 1982, eight Soviet bombers came down on the USS Enterprise and USS Midway in the North Pacific and locked their radars on both carriers from about 190 kilometres out. The US Navy’s response was deliberately restrained, because...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Four twin-engined transports fly line abreast, eighty metres apart, a hundred and fifty feet above the canopy. Behind each one a white plume spreads and settles into the trees. The run takes about four and a half minutes and covers sixteen kilometres....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
Recent Comments