Im September 1967 hob eine ungelenke viermotorige Turboprop-Maschine von der Startbahn des Luftwaffenstützpunkts Nha Trang in Südvietnam ab. Sie sah aus wie jede andere C-130 Hercules – das Arbeitspferd unter den Transportflugzeugen, das seit den frühen 1960er Jahren Truppen, Munition und Jeeps durch das gesamte Einsatzgebiet transportiert hatte.
Argentinien zog im April 1982 mit nur fünf luftgestützten Exocet-Raketen in den Falklandkrieg. Fünf. Das war der gesamte Bestand – Frankreich hatte die Variante AM39 zusammen mit einigen Super-Étendard-Jagdflugzeugen erst wenige Monate vor Konfliktbeginn geliefert, und die...
Eine Boeing 737-800 der S7 Airlines rutschte am 30. Juni auf dem Flughafen Mirny in der russischen Republik Sacha von der Landebahn ab und kam im Schlamm hinter der befestigten Fläche zum Stehen. Alle 173 Passagiere und sechs Besatzungsmitglieder blieben unverletzt. Der Vorfall wurde als geheim eingestuft.
Share this story Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune,...
Share this story Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second...
Share this story Look at it from above and the name explains itself. The Douglas F4D was a broad, tailless delta with gently rounded wingtips — the silhouette of a manta ray gliding through water. The Navy called it the Skyray. The pilots, with magnificent...
Share this story Count the engines. Most jets have two, or four. The Martin XB-51 had three — two slung under the nose in pods, and a third buried in the tail, breathing through an intake at the base of the fin. It is one of the strangest combat aircraft the...
Share this story The Wi-Fi on your next Alaska or Hawaiian flight may now be faster than the connection in your living room. Alaska Air Group says roughly 150 of its aircraft are flying with SpaceX’s Starlink internet — and for a lot of passengers, it is...
Share this story For sixty years, one of the most welcome sounds on an American aircraft carrier was not a fighter. It was the drone of two big turboprops on approach. The C-2 Greyhound brought the mail, the spare parts, the fresh food, and the sailors heading home on...
Share this story United Flight 1513, a Boeing 737-700 inbound from Key West with 106 people on board, is on final approach to Newark Liberty on a Friday afternoon when the crew sees a small circular object — perhaps three feet across — flash past about a...
Share this story It is just after six o’clock on a Saturday evening at Miami International Airport. American Airlines Flight 308, an Airbus A319 loaded with passengers bound for Bermuda, has been cleared onto Runway 8 and is beginning to roll. Then the crew sees...
Share this story RAND analysis argues that oil shortages alone can grind Russia’s war machine to a halt — just as strikes on fuel infrastructure crippled Nazi Germany in the Second World War. An army that runs out of fuel cannot keep fighting.Michael Bohnert —...
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