History & Legends, Military Aviation
In a refrigerated room hidden beneath London’s Smithfield Meat Market in 1943, behind a screen of hanging animal carcasses, a future Nobel Prize winner was busy perfecting a recipe. Not for food — for a building material. His task: prove that you could build the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At one minute past one in the morning on December 20, 1989, the warm tropical dark outside the Panamanian Defense Force barracks at Rio Hato was ripped apart by two enormous explosions. Soldiers tumbled from their bunks into the confusion, scanning a black sky for the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured rather than built....
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Here’s something the U.S. Navy doesn’t put in the recruitment brochures: the hardest thing a naval aviator will ever do isn’t dogfighting, or dodging surface-to-air missiles, or threading a low-level attack run through a mountain valley. It’s...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Every fighter pilot trains for it. Most pray they’ll never experience it. The moment a jet engine — the machine that keeps you flying at 500 knots and 30,000 feet — stops working. Whether it’s a compressor stall that sounds like a cannon going off behind...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put bombs on it. For...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only place left for fuel...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if it ever crashed....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a turbojet buried in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no air-breathing...
Recent Comments