Teilen Sie diese Geschichte: Der Kalte Krieg wurde nie zu einem Krieg. Das ist die gängige Tatsache, und man könnte sie leicht fälschlicherweise für einen Beweis halten, dass die Gefahr übertrieben dargestellt wurde. Das war sie aber nicht. Mindestens viermal zwischen 1945 und 1989 versagte der Apparat, der einen dritten Krieg verhindern sollte….
Teilen Sie diese Geschichte: Obergefreiter Leonard Fuller war 22 Jahre alt, drei Monate in der Flugausbildung und wurde gerade von einem anderen Flugzeug überrollt. Nicht getroffen. Überrollt. Die Avro Anson unter ihm hatte ihren Geschützturm in seine linke Flügelwurzel gerammt und war stecken geblieben….
Teilen Sie diese Geschichte: Der Boeing CH-47 Chinook absolvierte seinen Erstflug am 21. September 1961. John F. Kennedy war Präsident. Die Berliner Mauer war zwei Monate alt. Er wird noch immer produziert und ist weiterhin im aktiven Dienst der US Army, der Royal Air Force und eines Dutzends weiterer Luftwaffen. Deutschland….
Share this story Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a...
Share this story In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is...
Share this story In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would...
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
Share this story Here is a puzzle. A modern fighter jet is designed to fly something like 8,000 hours before its airframe is worn out. And yet, across NATO, air forces routinely retire their fighters long before they reach that limit — parking perfectly flyable...
Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
Share this story In 1943, someone at Saunders-Roe looked at the vast, airfield-free emptiness of the Pacific and had a gloriously contrary idea: what if your fighter did not need a runway at all? What if it just landed on the sea? The result was the SR.A/1 — the...
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