Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to sit in any of...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Ask anyone who was there and they will tell you the same thing: you heard it before you saw it. A low, chopping pulse rolling in over the treeline, whop-whop-whop, growing until it filled the whole sky. For a generation of soldiers, that sound meant almost everything...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Few aircraft announce themselves before they are seen. The Tupolev Tu-95, known to NATO as the “Bear,” is one of them. It is a large, four-engine turboprop strategic bomber, and yet it cruises at speeds normally reserved for jets. That contradiction, a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Some aeroplanes are admired. A rare few are loved. The Hawker Hunter belongs firmly to the second category, and it has done so since the day it first slipped into the air in 1951. Ask a British pilot of a certain vintage to name the most beautiful jet ever built and...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Say “four-engine British heavy bomber” to almost anyone and you will get the same answer: the Lancaster. The Avro Lancaster is the one that flew the Dambusters raid, the one still cruising over air shows on a summer afternoon, the one bolted into the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Some aircraft whisper. The Avro Shackleton announced itself from three valleys away. Long before you could see it, you felt it: a deep, chest-rattling drone that rolled across the North Atlantic like distant artillery, the unmistakable sound of four Rolls-Royce...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Every so often an aeroplane arrives that is so obviously ahead of its moment that it embarrasses everything parked next to it. In October 1934, on a new airfield at Mildenhall in Suffolk, three of them lined up on the same morning. They were de Havilland DH.88 Comets,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Picture a field in occupied France. It is a little after midnight, and there is a full moon riding above the poplars. Three people stand in the wet grass, holding bicycle lamps, hearts going like drums. They are listening. And then they hear it: a single engine, far...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the morning of 15 July 1942, eight American warplanes went hunting for a break in the weather over the North Atlantic and found the roof of the world instead. They had left Greenland at first light, bound for Iceland and then the war in Europe, but a wall of cloud...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Few aircraft state their purpose as plainly as the Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant. It was a barn with wings: a slab-sided freighter with a wingspan of 55.2 metres (181 ft 1 in), a nose that split open into clamshell doors, and a cargo hold eleven metres long into which...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Picture the scene over the grey Atlantic in 1943. A Luftwaffe fighter pilot spots a fat, slow British flying boat lumbering along at wave-top height, an unmissable target the size of a small ferry. Easy kill, surely. And yet, again and again, German pilots found...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
For the first year of the Pacific war, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero had a kind of spell over Allied pilots. It turned tighter, climbed better and reached farther than anything the US Navy could put up against it, and the men flying the stubby F4F Wildcat learned to survive...
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