Aviation World, Military Aviation
Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person strapped into it...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The story usually goes like this. Germany built a wooden night fighter to match the de Havilland Mosquito. It was fast and it worked. Then the RAF bombed the single factory making the special glue that held it together, the substitute adhesive was corrosive, the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1949, English Electric wanted to build a supersonic fighter with sixty degrees of wing sweep. Nobody in the world had flown a wing swept that far. The Royal Aircraft Establishment thought it would be uncontrollable at low speed, and said so. There was no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British scientists had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1982, forty years after the last one made sense, a Soviet design bureau flew a jet attack aircraft with a rear gunner. Not a token installation. A proper remotely-controlled tail turret with a twin-barrelled 23 mm cannon, aimed by a second crewman sitting in his...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every airborne early warning aircraft in the world looks broadly the same: a transport or an airliner with an enormous rotating dish balanced on struts above the fuselage. The Hawkeye does it. The Sentry does it. Even GlobalEye, which uses a fixed array rather than a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In January 1943, Allied aircraft in New Guinea flew 416 sorties against a single Japanese convoy and sank two ships. Six weeks later, over three days in the Bismarck Sea, the same air force attacked another convoy and sank all eight transports and half its destroyer...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, a wooden glider carrying twenty-eight men hit the ground at over ninety miles an hour, tore through barbed wire, and stopped about fifty yards from a bridge over the Caen Canal. It had been cast off from a bomber at 7,000 feet nine minutes...
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