Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Picture the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin in February 1938. The arena is packed. Down on the floor sits a contraption that looks like a light trainer that has lost its wings and grown two enormous three-blade fans on outrigger struts. A slight young...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story By 1943 the arithmetic over Germany had turned against the Luftwaffe. American daylight bomber streams — the tight, mutually-defending boxes of B-17s and B-24s — were arriving in numbers that piston fighters could not blunt fast enough....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Few aircraft have been asked to carry as much mythology on so little lift as the Sack AS-6. Search the phrase ‘Nazi flying saucer’ and this stubby, disc-winged machine appears again and again, presented as evidence that the Third Reich was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Here is a fact that sounds invented: to bail out of the Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster, you first had to blow your own propellers off. The two blades spinning behind the tail would have shredded anyone who jumped, so Douglas wired the tailcone with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1925, somewhere in the American countryside, Willard Ray Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof clean off a barn. Most people would have seen a repair bill. Custer saw physics. The roof had not moved forward — yet it rose. He reasoned that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It was a little after ten on the night of 24 March 1944, and the pine woods of Lower Silesia were locked hard in frost. Some yards short of the tree line, the earth stirred, then opened. A head appeared, then a pair of shoulders in a made-over...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the autumn of 1940, a young man from Iowa or California or Brooklyn would stand at a Canadian train station with a suitcase and a lie ready on his lips. He was not, officially, going to war. His government had made that illegal. Joining the armed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Picture the Philippine Sea at mid-morning on 19 June 1944. The water is glassy, the horizon hazed with heat, and 25,000 feet up a Grumman Hellcat pilot is watching a stain spread across the sky to the west. It is not weather. It is aircraft —...
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