History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1946, Britain was perhaps six months away from becoming the first nation to fly faster than sound. In a guarded hangar sat a small, bullet-shaped jet called the Miles M.52, all but finished, its test pilot chosen, its supersonic trials pencilled in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine a fighter aircraft that cannot take off. It has no way to move under its own power on the runway, no way to build up speed, no way to leave the ground at all. To fly it, you must bolt it to the roof of an airliner, haul it up to altitude, and drop it — and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, London was under siege from a weapon no one could see coming until it was too late. The V-1 flying bomb — the “doodlebug” — buzzed across the Channel by the hundred, and its droning pulsejet was a sound Londoners learned to dread. When the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Half a century ago, the SEPECAT Jaguar screamed across the plains of northern Germany at treetop height, a nuclear bomb slung beneath its belly and the Warsaw Pact in its sights. France retired it in 2005. Britain let it go in 2007. Oman parked its last examples in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 24 September 1958, a flight of Nationalist Chinese F-86 Sabres was climbing over the Taiwan Strait when a formation of Communist MiG-17s slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no fighter had ever...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every so often a fighter comes along that wins its contest so completely that the argument simply stops. The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is that aircraft. It out-flew a rival prototype, rewrote what a fighter was supposed to do, and entered service as the most capable...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Dawn over Kadena, and the concrete is already trembling. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans spool up behind a jet the size of a small barn, the pilot walks the throttles into afterburner, and for a heartbeat the whole world is noise. Then the nose comes up — and keeps...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most fighter pilots come up through the same narrow chute: flight school, a commission, a cockpit before they are old enough to rent a car without a surcharge. Kenneth Gilmore came up through a football program. Before he ever pulled Gs, he was drawing plays on a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somewhere over the Nevada high desert, a young American fighter pilot rolls into a turn and sees something that should not exist. A stubby, silver dart is sliding into formation off his wing — snub nose, sharp delta, a red star where a national insignia ought to be....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some Cold War weapons were terrifying. A few were beautiful. And then there was the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 — a machine that looked like a flying saucer had mated with a submarine, and was built, in all seriousness, to stalk and kill American nuclear missile boats. It...
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