Share this story Somebody in the Soviet Ministry of Aircraft Industry decided that what agriculture needed was a jet. Not a jet trainer, not a jet transport. A jet crop-duster. A biplane one. The PZL M-15 Belphegor is the only jet-powered biplane ever put into series...
Partagez cette histoire. Le Junkers G.38 avait une aile de deux mètres d'épaisseur à l'emplanture. Junkers, fidèle à sa réputation, a considéré ce volume comme un gaspillage et a décidé d'y installer des passagers. Sur le deuxième appareil, six personnes prenaient place à bord….
Share this story If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as...
Share this story Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they...
Share this story The Pacific is the largest single feature on the planet. In 1928 nobody had flown across it, and the reason was arithmetic: the distances between usable landfalls were longer than any aircraft could reliably manage, and if you missed the island you...
Share this story When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open...
Share this story In 1926 an oilfield roughneck in Oklahoma took a metal splinter in his left eye and lost it. Seven years later, the same man flew around the world on his own in under eight days, and then went looking for the edge of the atmosphere. Wiley Post had one...
Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
Partagez cette histoire. Regardez un Blohm & Voss BV 141 de face et votre cerveau proteste. Le moteur et l'empennage sont à gauche. L'équipage est installé dans une nacelle vitrée à droite. Il n'y a pas de fuselage au milieu, car il n'y a pas de milieu. On dirait deux appareils différents….
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Partagez cette histoire. Le 2 juin 1944, des B-17 de la Quinzième Air Force bombardèrent des gares de triage en Hongrie, puis poursuivirent leur route vers l'est. Ils atterrirent en Ukraine, sur trois aérodromes soviétiques que l'Armée rouge avait remis aux Américains. C'était la première fois de la guerre que….
Recent Comments