History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon systems officer,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January 1968 they needed a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes where American...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews reported attacking...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a category of military aircraft that never fires a shot and decides the battle anyway. The Beriev A-50 is one of them: an Ilyushin Il-76 transport with a nine-metre radar dish bolted on top, fifteen people inside, and the ability to see six hundred kilometres...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to scrap. They became...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales. China’s J-20 is...
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