History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load fifty-two American...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late 1950s the US Army went looking for a machine that no one had ever quite built: something between a jeep and a helicopter. A flying jeep — a simple platform a soldier could stand on, lift straight up, and buzz over a battlefield. It sounds like a cartoon....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On paper, the Rockwell XFV-12 was a dream: a supersonic, Mach-2 fighter that could rise straight up off a small ship’s deck, fight like an F-4 Phantom, and land vertically in a space no runway could offer. The US Navy wanted it badly. Rockwell promised it could be...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a single year, Italy believed it had built the first jet aeroplane in history. On 27 August 1940, a sleek, barrel-shaped machine howled into the sky over Milan with no propeller anywhere to be seen — and the world’s aviation authority duly recorded it as the first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1942, someone at General Motors had a tidy idea: instead of designing a new fighter from scratch, why not bolt one together from parts of aircraft that already existed? Take a Mustang’s wings, a dive-bomber’s tail, a Corsair’s landing gear, wrap them around the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looked like the future had landed on a dry lakebed in California: a needle-nosed, stiletto-slim jet built entirely for speed, sheathed in titanium, designed to cruise at twice the speed of sound. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was the sleekest research aircraft of its...
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