Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Some aeroplanes shout. The Percival Mew Gull whispered — a slip of a thing, barely twenty feet long, its wings not much wider than a family car, built almost entirely of wood and glue in a shed at Gravesend. You could have mistaken it for a toy....
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Every elegant aircraft has an ungainly predecessor. Before the Hawker Siddeley Harrier hovered over Falklands task forces and Marine Corps flight decks, there was the Hawker P.1127: a stubby, bug-eyed prototype that looked less like a fighter than an...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Before the Lancaster, before the B-17, before the very idea of a four-engined heavy bomber was settled doctrine, one already existed — and it was bombing London. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, built from 1916, was a four-engined biplane with a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story On the morning of 27 August 1939, over the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small, stub-nosed monoplane lifted off with a sound no one had heard from an aeroplane before: a rising, tearing howl in place of the familiar hammer of pistons. It was...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story In 1943, someone at Saunders-Roe looked at the vast, airfield-free emptiness of the Pacific and had a gloriously contrary idea: what if your fighter did not need a runway at all? What if it just landed on the sea? The result was the SR.A/1 — the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Picture the pitch meeting. It is 1948, the jet age is barely out of diapers, and someone at the U.S. Navy stands up and says: what if the fighter took off from the ocean? No carrier. No runway. Just a supersonic delta-wing jet, water-skiing into the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Somewhere over the Channel, in a slick of oil and cold grey swell, a fighter pilot is treading water and losing the argument with hypothermia. He hears it before he sees it: a slow, clattering drone, an aeroplane that looks less like it is flying and...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Picture a beer keg with wings. Now bolt a nine-cylinder radial to the front, wedge a nervous pilot in behind it, and paint a red star on the side. Congratulations: you have just imagined the Polikarpov I-16, the stubbiest, twitchiest, most quietly...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story In the late 1930s the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was, briefly, the most modern airliner in the sky: a clean, four-engined monoplane that could cross an ocean without stopping. Within three years the same graceful airframe was ranging far out over the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story On a grey October afternoon in 1934, the mountains above Lake Garda heard something they would never hear again. A scarlet machine sat low on the water at Desenzano, twin floats trembling, and then its engine spoke — not a drone but a detonating...
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