Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Share this story On 28 May 2017, a photographer at Miho Air Base in western Japan took a picture of a Kawasaki C-2 transport, tail number 68-1203. It was an unremarkable aeroplane doing an unremarkable thing: a high-winged, T-tailed freighter on a ramp, clean-lined...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Share this story Two weeks ago the story was aircraft going home. Raptors leaving the Gulf for England, squadrons rotating out, a ceasefire holding well enough that the US Air Force felt comfortable thinning out its presence in the region. That lasted about as long as...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Share this story On the morning of 16 July, two French Rafales and two Luftwaffe Eurofighter Typhoons met in European airspace and took fuel from a French A330 Phenix tanker. No weapons were carried. The manoeuvres were unremarkable. Any air force in NATO does this on...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Share this story Everyone knows who first broke the sound barrier: Chuck Yeager, October 1947, the orange Bell X-1, a rib strapped up with a broom handle. It is one of the great stories in aviation. But there is a second name that belongs beside it — a quiet engineer...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Share this story Ask anyone which airliner first broke the sound barrier and they will say Concorde. They will be wrong by seven years — and by one very ordinary-looking Douglas jetliner that most people have completely forgotten. On 21 August 1961, a standard Douglas...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In the late 1950s the US Army went looking for a machine that no one had ever quite built: something between a jeep and a helicopter. A flying jeep — a simple platform a soldier could stand on, lift straight up, and buzz over a battlefield. It sounds...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story On paper, the Rockwell XFV-12 was a dream: a supersonic, Mach-2 fighter that could rise straight up off a small ship’s deck, fight like an F-4 Phantom, and land vertically in a space no runway could offer. The US Navy wanted it badly. Rockwell...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story For a single year, Italy believed it had built the first jet aeroplane in history. On 27 August 1940, a sleek, barrel-shaped machine howled into the sky over Milan with no propeller anywhere to be seen — and the world’s aviation authority duly...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In 1942, someone at General Motors had a tidy idea: instead of designing a new fighter from scratch, why not bolt one together from parts of aircraft that already existed? Take a Mustang’s wings, a dive-bomber’s tail, a Corsair’s landing gear, wrap...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story It looked like the future had landed on a dry lakebed in California: a needle-nosed, stiletto-slim jet built entirely for speed, sheathed in titanium, designed to cruise at twice the speed of sound. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was the sleekest research...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story Everyone knows the Lockheed A-12 and its famous descendant, the SR-71 Blackbird — the black, Mach-3 spy planes that outran every missile ever fired at them. Almost nobody remembers the aircraft that nearly beat them to the job: Convair’s Kingfish, an...
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