Share this story 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...
Share this story 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...
Share this story 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...
Share this story Earlier this year the RAF’s first E-7 Wedgetail spent a period at a Wiltshire airfield most people have never heard of, having its systems activated and its radar calibrated, before it was allowed anywhere near an operational squadron. That is...
Share this story Every bomb ever built before 1944 was designed to hit the thing it was aimed at. Barnes Wallis built two that were designed to land next to it. This was not a compromise or an admission that bombing was inaccurate. It was the entire principle. Wallis...
Share this story When Iranian missiles struck an air base in eastern Jordan last Friday and killed American servicemen, the base was identified in every report by its name: Muwaffaq Salti. Almost nobody outside Jordan knows who that was. He was a first lieutenant in...
Share this story Militarily, Suez worked. In six days, Anglo-French air power destroyed the Egyptian Air Force largely on the ground, paratroops took an airfield, Royal Marines made the first helicopter assault in the history of warfare, and the invasion force held...
Share this story Everything a combat pilot knows about dropping a bomb assumes air. Thick air, at sensible altitudes, where wings generate predictable lift, engines produce rated thrust, and a weapon released at a known speed follows a known arc to the ground. In May...
Share this story At 2005 on 17 May 1987, the guided missile frigate USS Stark was told that an Iraqi aircraft had left the mainland and was heading south down the Persian Gulf. This was not alarming. Iraqi aircraft did this most nights, hunting tankers carrying...
Share this story The A Shau valley, 10 March 1966. A Special Forces camp is being overrun by two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. The hills either side rise fifteen hundred feet and the cloud base is at eight hundred, which means any aircraft coming to help has to...
Share this story Everyone knows who first broke the sound barrier: Chuck Yeager, October 1947, the orange Bell X-1, a rib strapped up with a broom handle. It is one of the great stories in aviation. But there is a second name that belongs beside it — a quiet engineer...
Comparte esta historia. Pregúntale a cualquiera qué avión de pasajeros rompió primero la barrera del sonido y te dirán que el Concorde. Se equivocarán por siete años, y por un avión Douglas de aspecto muy común que la mayoría de la gente ha olvidado por completo. El 21 de agosto de 1961, un Douglas estándar...
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