Share this story The Rockwell B-1B programme took to the air for the first time on 23 March 1983, in the shape of a modified B-1A testbed — and it should never have happened. Six years earlier, on 30 June 1977, President Jimmy Carter had stood before reporters in...
Share this story Legend says the Japanese soldiers in Burma had a name for it: the Whispering Death — supposedly because by the time the engines were audible, the aircraft was already in firing position with its quartet of 20mm Hispano cannon and six 7.7mm Brownings...
Share this story “Six turning, four burning” is one of the great aviation phrases. The six are 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Majors, mounted backwards along the trailing edge of the wing, swinging massive pusher propellers through air thinner...
Share this story The Lockheed U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson at Skunk Works in 1955 to fly at 70,000 feet, photograph Soviet missile silos in colour, and never — under any circumstances — go anywhere near a body of water. The U-2 had bicycle landing gear. The U-2...
Share this story If you had asked a Soviet test pilot in 1940 to name the strangest aeroplane he had ever been ordered to fly, there is an excellent chance the answer would have come back as four syllables: Дэ-Бэ Эл-Ка. The Belyayev DB-LK. Two fuselages, no central...
Share this story The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most expensive single weapons programme of the Second World War. It cost more than the Manhattan Project. Its development consumed three billion dollars of 1944 money — call it sixty billion today — and produced...
Share this story On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed one of the two aircraft at the heart of a pioneering German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal...
Share this story For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters...
Share this story Most aircraft are designed around an engine. Some are designed around a payload. The Edgley EA-7 Optica is the only certified aircraft in aviation history designed around a view. Every other consideration — speed, range, payload, looks —...
Share this story On 4 September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft ever built in Britain took off on its maiden flight from Filton, near Bristol. It had a wingspan of 70 metres — longer than a Boeing 747’s. Eight engines, buried in the wings in pairs,...
Share this story The Bell AH-1 Cobra is the most consequential helicopter design in American military history. Before the Cobra, every armed helicopter in the world was a transport airframe with weapons bolted onto it — a Huey with door guns, a Mi-4 with rocket pods,...
Share this story Most people assume that becoming a pilot requires good eyesight and a steady hand. That much is true. What most people don’t realize is just how deep the medical rabbit hole goes — and how some of the conditions that can ground you are genuinely...
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