Share this story By 1944 the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was already one of the biggest, heaviest single-engine fighters of the war — a seven-ton brute that pilots adored. Then Republic asked a wild question: what if we made it even bigger, and bolted on the most...
Share this story Long before the Predator, before the Reaper, before a single Hellfire was ever fired from an unmanned aircraft, a little jet-powered drone with a bug’s name was already flying spy missions over the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. It was...
Share this story It is white, it is enormous, and it is faster than almost anything with a bomb bay. Russian crews call the Tupolev Tu-160 the “White Swan” for its pale anti-flash paint and its improbably graceful lines. The rest of the world knows it by...
Share this story Shooting down a ballistic missile with a laser sounds like science fiction. For a brief period around 2010, it was an American aircraft parked on a runway in California. The Boeing YAL-1 was a 747 with a megawatt-class laser built into its fuselage...
Share this story By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave...
Share this story In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the...
Share this story Most vertical-takeoff jets of the 1960s did the obvious thing: point the engine nozzles down and blast the aircraft off the ground. Ryan’s XV-5 Vertifan did something far stranger. It hid two enormous fans inside its wings, spun them with its...
Share this story The name Curtiss-Wright carried a century of aviation in it — the fusion of Glenn Curtiss’s company with the firm founded by the Wright brothers themselves. For decades it built engines, propellers and aircraft that helped win two world...
Share this story Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft...
Share this story There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is...
Share this story An offshore patrol vessel is, as a rule, a modest thing: a hull built for endurance, a single medium gun, a job description that runs to fisheries protection and chasing smugglers. The United Arab Emirates has looked at that formula and, politely,...
Share this story On paper, it should have worked. Take the superb Douglas Skyraider, replace its thundering piston engine with a modern turboprop of more than 5,000 horsepower, and the U.S. Navy would have a carrier attack aircraft faster and harder-hitting than...
Recent Comments