Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes anyway. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 5:55 on the evening of Friday 4 October 1918, a small biplane with cardboard wings and a papier-mâché body lifted off a wheeled dolly running down a portable track near Dayton, Ohio. There was nobody aboard and nobody controlling it. It was supposed to fly a preset...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human’s for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first. The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a helium balloon...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed was one half of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers on the front and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good whatsoever, because...
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