Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was to come looking...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
At 3:46 in the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1935, a four-engined flying boat lifted off the water at Alameda, California, and set course west across an ocean that no aeroplane had ever crossed on a schedule. Around twenty thousand people were standing on the shore...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in the USSR, but...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet Atlantic is the...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
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 still in...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Some aeroplanes shout. The Percival Mew Gull whispered — a slip of a thing, barely twenty feet long, its wings not much wider than a family car, built almost entirely of wood and glue in a shed at Gravesend. You could have mistaken it for a toy. And yet, through...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
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. Those three tail...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have been the story....
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Somewhere over the Channel, in a slick of oil and cold grey swell, a fighter pilot is treading water and losing the argument with hypothermia. He hears it before he sees it: a slow, clattering drone, an aeroplane that looks less like it is flying and more like it is...
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