Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In the autumn of 1996, a jet took off from a secret airfield in the Nevada desert that looked less like an aircraft and more like a prop from a science-fiction film. Faceless, tailless, hunched, its single engine hidden inside its spine, it slipped...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story Picture a fighter shaped like a dinner plate. Not a sleek dart, not a graceful sweep of wings — a fat, near-circular disc with a bubble canopy stuck on top and two enormous propellers windmilling at the tips. It looks like something that should be...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Share this story Six weeks ago, a B-52 Stratofortress carrying the U.S. Air Force’s brand-new radar rolled down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base, lifted off, and crashed. All eight crew were killed. The single jet fitted with the upgrade the entire bomber...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Share this story There is a hangar in Aichi Prefecture where Japan already bolts together the most advanced fighter it has ever flown — the F-35 Lightning II, screwed together under licence for the Air Self-Defense Force. Soon that same hall will assemble something...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story On 13 October 1954, a Royal Navy pilot named Lieutenant B.D. Macfarlane was catapulted off the carrier HMS Albion when his engine died. His aircraft flopped into the sea directly ahead of the ship, which then ran straight over it, slicing the fighter...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In December 1931, a cocky 21-year-old RAF pilot named Douglas Bader tried a low, showy roll in his biplane, clipped a wingtip on the grass, and crashed. Surgeons took his right leg above the knee that day, and his left below the knee months later. His...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks,...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story Some aircraft are beautiful. The Blackburn Beverley was not one of them. It looked like a shipping container that had grown four propellers and a pair of tails and decided to fly anyway — a slab-sided barn of an aeroplane with its wheels bolted...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story Tens of thousands of Axis prisoners spent the Second World War behind Allied wire. Exactly one of them broke out, crossed an ocean, and made it all the way back to his own side to fly again. His name was Franz von Werra, and the film they made about...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Share this story By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Share this story On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat...
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