Share this story At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard,...
Share this story At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks...
Share this story On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that...
Share this story On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then...
El documento más importante en la historia de los aviones furtivos no fue escrito en California ni en un aeródromo secreto en el desierto. Fue escrito en Moscú, en ruso, por un físico soviético, y la Unión Soviética permitió que se publicara en el extranjero porque decidió que el trabajo no tenía ninguna utilidad...
Si miras el costado del barco, lo verás: el fantasma de un avión. Dos alas, un fuselaje, incluso los puntales de un tren de aterrizaje fijo: la silueta a tamaño real de una aeronave, impresa sobre acero naval gris. Es una de las fotografías más extrañas e inquietantes...
En la historia de los aviones de combate, casi nadie recuerda al subcampeón. El avión que pierde la competición recibe una placa en un museo, si tiene suerte, y el ganador se queda con la línea de producción. El Northrop YF-17 Cobra es la gran excepción. Perdió, y luego pasó a...
Hay aviones grandes, y luego estaba el Mriya. Si te paras debajo de un Boeing 747, te sientes pequeño. Si te paras debajo de un An-225, el 747 empieza a parecer pequeño. Durante 33 años existió exactamente una de estas máquinas: un gigante soviético de seis motores construido para un solo...
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter...
Share this story In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico...
Share this story On a May morning in 1957, over the Pacific near Christmas Island, a Vickers Valiant called XD818 opened its bomb bay and released a device that fell away, dropped for long seconds, and then turned the sky white. Britain had just become a thermonuclear...
Share this story Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined...
Recent Comments