He Got It to Base, Then Ejected

He Got It to Base, Then Ejected

The jet was already lost. The 51-year-old major flying it had seconds to decide where it would come down, and below him lay the outskirts of Szolnok, a Hungarian city of roughly 70,000 people. He did not pull the handle. Instead he stayed with the aircraft and steered...
The Fastest Seaplane Ever Built

The Fastest Seaplane Ever Built

On a grey October afternoon in 1934, the mountains above Lake Garda heard something they would never hear again. A scarlet machine sat low on the water at Desenzano, twin floats trembling, and then its engine spoke — not a drone but a detonating roar that rolled...
The Windmill That Refused to Stall

The Windmill That Refused to Stall

There is a particular kind of genius that begins not with ambition but with fear. Juan de la Cierva was afraid of the stall — that treacherous moment when a wing, robbed of airspeed, simply stops flying and drops its pilot out of the sky. In 1919 one of his own...