Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
Share this story Look at a Blohm & Voss BV 141 head-on and your brain files a complaint. The engine and the tail are on the left. The crew sit in a glass pod on the right. There is no fuselage in the middle, because there is no middle. It looks like two different...
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Comparte esta historia El 2 de junio de 1944, bombarderos B-17 de la Decimoquinta Fuerza Aérea bombardearon estaciones de clasificación ferroviaria en Hungría y luego continuaron hacia el este. Aterrizaron en Ucrania, en tres aeródromos soviéticos que el Ejército Rojo había entregado a los estadounidenses. Fue la primera vez en la guerra que un...
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
Comparte esta historia La pista de aterrizaje de la RAF Lyneham la mañana del 22 de julio de 1966 albergaba uno de los aviones menos probables de Gran Bretaña: un interceptor Lightning sin cabina, con el asiento eyectable desactivado, el tren de aterrizaje inmovilizado y un hombre en la cabina que no llevaba puesto...
Comparte esta historia. El Boeing B-52 Stratofortress lleva setenta años en servicio y va camino de alcanzar los cien. Ha sobrevivido a la Unión Soviética, a la hélice y a la mayoría de los ingenieros que lo diseñaron. Y el diseño que hizo posible todo eso...
Share this story The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF’s great four-engine heavy bombers — into service before the Halifax, before the Lancaster, the aircraft that opened Britain’s strategic bombing war. It was huge, handsome and, in the end,...
Share this story When Soviet-built MiG-15s came screaming over Korea in late 1950 with their swept wings and steep climb, the United States Navy had a problem. Its best carrier jet, the Grumman F9F Panther, was a fine, sturdy machine — but its straight wing...
Share this story In the early 1950s the United States lay awake at night worrying about Soviet bombers slipping across the Arctic in the dark. The aircraft it scrambled to meet them was the Lockheed F-94 Starfire — the first American jet fighter with an...
Share this story In 1935 a newspaper baron dared British industry to build the fastest civil aircraft in Europe. The result was so quick that when the Royal Air Force turned it into a bomber, it could outrun its own fighters. Two years later that same design flew the...
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