Mundo de la aviación, Historia y leyendas
El 15 de noviembre de 1988, una nave espacial que se parecía casi exactamente al transbordador espacial estadounidense despegó del cosmódromo de Baikonur sobre una columna de fuego, orbitó la Tierra dos veces y aterrizó en una pista con un viento cruzado de 60 km/h, sin nadie a bordo y sin...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
No era rápido. No era bonito. No podía combatir en combate aéreo. Y durante treinta años, cuando el tiempo empeoraba y el objetivo permanecía oculto bajo las nubes y la oscuridad que lo paralizaban todo, la Armada estadounidense enviaba el Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsónico, de morro chato y...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
El Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet ascendía a más de 3600 metros por minuto, tan rápido que las tripulaciones de los bombarderos aliados, al verlo por primera vez en el verano de 1944, apenas podían seguirlo. En un único y vertiginoso arco podía alcanzar a los bombarderos, disparar y...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell into the sea,...
Mundo de la aviación, Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes anyway. The...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
At 5:55 on the evening of Friday 4 October 1918, a small biplane with cardboard wings and a papier-mâché body lifted off a wheeled dolly running down a portable track near Dayton, Ohio. There was nobody aboard and nobody controlling it. It was supposed to fly a preset...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human’s for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first. The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a helium balloon...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed was one half of...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers on the front and...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good whatsoever, because...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
At 02:19 on 21 November 1970, an American helicopter deliberately flew itself into the trees inside a North Vietnamese prison camp twenty-three miles from Hanoi. Its rotor blades chewed through forty-foot foliage and it came down hard in a courtyard roughly the size...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
On the evening of 14 October 1973, a C-5A Galaxy touched down at Lod airport outside Tel Aviv carrying 97 tons of 105 mm howitzer shells. Roughly a hundred miles to the south-west, the largest tank battle since Kursk was being fought, and the Israeli army was running...
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