Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story It was meant to be one of the shortest, dullest legs in the timetable. At 19:52 on 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 climbed away from London Heathrow bound for Belfast, a Boeing 737-400 with 118 passengers and eight crew aboard. The aircraft...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Here is a fact that sounds invented: to bail out of the Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster, you first had to blow your own propellers off. The two blades spinning behind the tail would have shredded anyone who jumped, so Douglas wired the tailcone with...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Picture the Philippine Sea at mid-morning on 19 June 1944. The water is glassy, the horizon hazed with heat, and 25,000 feet up a Grumman Hellcat pilot is watching a stain spread across the sky to the west. It is not weather. It is aircraft —...
Monde de l'aviation, Nouvelles
Share this story For the crowd gathered at Old Warden on the evening of 15 August, it was meant to be the gentlest of spectacles: vintage aeroplanes flying to a live orchestra as the light softened, the Shuttleworth Collection’s famous “Flying...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story By 1931 the rest of the world was building sleek metal monoplanes. Imperial Airways bought a fabric-covered biplane with four engines, a fixed undercarriage and a cruising speed of about 100 mph, and flew it for nine years without killing anybody. The...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Some aircraft look powerful. A few look beautiful. The Scaled Composites Proteus looks impossible, a spindly, insect-like machine of twin booms, stalky tandem wings and a slender pod, apparently held together by optimism. It seems far too fragile to...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Seventy-four years ago today, on 16 August 1952, a large and beautiful British airliner lifted off from Filton for the first time. Passengers who later flew in it swore it was the smoothest, quietest airliner they had ever experienced, so hushed that...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Before there was a Channel Tunnel, and before roll-on, roll-off ferries could swallow a hundred cars at a time, there was a stranger, more glamorous way to take your car to France: you drove it into the nose of an aeroplane. The aircraft that did the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story For 41 years, the record for the fastest subsonic airliner crossing of the Atlantic belonged not to a Boeing or a Douglas, but to a graceful British jet with four engines bunched at its tail. The Vickers VC10 did London to New York in 5 hours and 1...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Imagine boarding a transatlantic flight, settling into your seat, and then, somewhere over the ocean, walking down a spiral staircase to a cocktail lounge for a drink and a hand of cards. That was not a fantasy in 1950. That was a Tuesday aboard the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story In the mid-1980s, Beechcraft decided to leap a generation ahead of everyone else. It teamed up with Burt Rutan, the most imaginative aircraft designer alive, and built a business aeroplane that looked like it had flown in from the next century: an...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story On the afternoon of 1 November 2011, a Boeing 767 slid down a runway at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport on its belly, spraying sparks and foam, with 231 people aboard and not a single wheel beneath it. When it stopped, everyone walked away. Some...
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