History & Legends, Military Aviation
Two hours into a surveillance mission over Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Kevin Henry felt it begin. A tingling in his joints. A creeping confusion behind his eyes. Then the nausea hit — sudden, violent, disorienting. At 70,000 feet in a Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady, the nitrogen...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine strapping yourself to a platform no larger than a manhole cover, powered by counter-rotating helicopter blades spinning beneath your feet, with nothing between you and the ground but air and optimism. Now imagine the U.S. Army telling you that any soldier...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somewhere over the Nevada desert in the spring of 1966, a shape detached itself from the back of what appeared to be an impossibly stretched SR-71 Blackbird. For a fraction of a second, the shape hung in the slipstream like a remora leaving a shark — and then the...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Seven hours into an ocean crossing, the airline passenger in 34C has lost all feeling in one leg, finished the bad movie, and is staring down a queue for the lavatory. A few thousand feet away, an Air Force pilot is doing the same crossing strapped into a single-seat...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Six miles above Budapest the air was forty degrees below zero, and the sky around the Flying Fortress named Mizpah had turned into a wall of black smoke and orange fire. It was 14 July 1944, and the flak over the Hungarian capital was the kind of fire that gunners on...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On April 25, 1982, a collection of British helicopters did something that hadn’t been done since World War II: they put a submarine out of action from the air. The target was ARA Santa Fe, an Argentine submarine caught on the surface near South Georgia Island...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On August 17, 1943, the United States Eighth Air Force launched what would become one of the most devastating bombing missions in the history of aerial warfare. The target was Germany’s ball bearing industry — a chokepoint that Allied planners believed could...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On May 10, 1970, an SR-71A Blackbird designated 61-7969 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. It would never return. What happened in the skies over Southeast Asia that day remains one of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the evening of 4 March 1957, a US Navy patrol blimp lifted off the apron at Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and pointed itself east, towards the Atlantic Ocean. Its envelope was 343 feet long. Its registration was Bureau Number 141561 and its name,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 February 2004, the Acting Secretary of the Army — a former Senate staffer and Vietnam veteran named Les Brownlee — stood at a Pentagon podium with the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, and announced the cancellation of one of the most...
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