Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that fit: it was, he...
Luftfahrtwelt, Militärische Luftfahrt
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Am Nachmittag des 26. Oktober 2001 standen Boeing-Chef Phil Condit und Frank Statkus, Leiter des Joint Strike Fighter-Programms, vor einem Fernseher, der eine Live-Übertragung aus dem Pentagon zeigte. Der größte Rüstungsauftrag der Geschichte – ein Tarnkappenjäger für vier bewaffnete...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined fighter the Third...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Look at almost any jet airliner and the engines are in one of two places: slung under the wings, or bolted to the tail. Now look at the VFW-614. Its two engines sit on pylons on top of the wings — a layout almost no other airliner in history has ever used. It was West...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the Americans had...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of Faro and came to...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
On April Fools’ Day 2001, seventy miles off China’s Hainan Island, a Chinese fighter pilot misjudged his third close pass at an American spy plane by a few feet — and nearly started a war. The collision sheared his J-8 interceptor in half, tore the...
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