History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a grey Welsh morning in early May, hikers lining the ridges above Cadair Idris heard the unmistakable rumble of twin Pratt & Whitney F100 engines reverberating off granite walls. Then it appeared: an F-15E Strike Eagle wearing a paint scheme that had not graced...
History & Legends, Military Aviation, News
On paper, the C-5 Galaxy is the most capable military transport aircraft ever built by the Western world. In practice, on any given day in 2025, 63 percent of the fleet is broken. That number — 37 percent mission capable — is not a rounding error or a statistical...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
It is 0200 hours in the Eastern Mediterranean. The flight deck of USS Gerald R. Ford smells faintly of jet fuel and seawater. A yellow-shirted Air Boss raises an arm. Three hundred feet of catapult — not steam, not for the first time in U.S. naval aviation history,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a new biplane...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It could sustain Mach 2 — a speed contemporary fighters could reach only in short dashes. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable streamlined pod...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let the tank glide...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
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