History & Legends, Military Aviation
In March 2026, Israel said it had destroyed Iran’s F-14 Tomcat fleet at Isfahan. Three months later Iranian state television showed a Tomcat coming home from a mission. Six months later, social media is still confidently announcing that the last Tomcats on earth...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
A Lockheed F-104 Starfighter came down final approach at 175 knots with full flaps, and that was the basic number. The pilot then added five knots for every 1,000 pounds of fuel still in the tanks above the first thousand. On a typical recovery that put the approach...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire. Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a jet pointing at...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1971 a Swiss fighter jet landed on a motorway. Not in an emergency — on purpose, as part of a doctrine that assumed Swiss airfields would be cratered within hours of a war starting, and that the air force would therefore have to operate from public roads. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Britain came out of the Second World War with a captured German idea it did not fully understand. The delta wing promised high speed and a strong, light structure, and the Germans had been drawing them for years. Nobody in Britain knew what one actually felt like to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a publication given to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In April 1980 a very ill old man was wheeled into a room at Northrop and shown a model of an aircraft. He had spent his career insisting that the ideal aeroplane was a wing and nothing else — no fuselage, no tail, no drag it did not need — and the industry...
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