History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft whisper. The Avro Shackleton announced itself from three valleys away. Long before you could see it, you felt it: a deep, chest-rattling drone that rolled across the North Atlantic like distant artillery, the unmistakable sound of four Rolls-Royce...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a field in occupied France. It is a little after midnight, and there is a full moon riding above the poplars. Three people stand in the wet grass, holding bicycle lamps, hearts going like drums. They are listening. And then they hear it: a single engine, far...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 15 July 1942, eight American warplanes went hunting for a break in the weather over the North Atlantic and found the roof of the world instead. They had left Greenland at first light, bound for Iceland and then the war in Europe, but a wall of cloud...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Few aircraft state their purpose as plainly as the Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant. It was a barn with wings: a slab-sided freighter with a wingspan of 55.2 metres (181 ft 1 in), a nose that split open into clamshell doors, and a cargo hold eleven metres long into which...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the scene over the grey Atlantic in 1943. A Luftwaffe fighter pilot spots a fat, slow British flying boat lumbering along at wave-top height, an unmissable target the size of a small ferry. Easy kill, surely. And yet, again and again, German pilots found...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For the first year of the Pacific war, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero had a kind of spell over Allied pilots. It turned tighter, climbed better and reached farther than anything the US Navy could put up against it, and the men flying the stubby F4F Wildcat learned to survive...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL cargo crew...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Grumman set out to build the finest carrier fighter of the Second World War: a twin-engine brute that could outrun and outgun anything in the sky and haul a bomber’s worth of ordnance off a flight deck. It succeeded. The Tigercat was blisteringly fast, savagely...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somewhere under the muddy shallows of Wassaw Sound, off the coast of Georgia, sits a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb. The United States Air Force dropped it there in 1958, searched for ten weeks, gave up, and has left it alone ever since. It is one of a handful of American...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Shortly after 11 a.m. on 16 August 1942, a sagging, half-deflated US Navy blimp came drifting low over the rooftops of Daly City, California, snagging telephone wires as a crowd chased it through the streets. It finally sank onto the pavement in front of a suburban...
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