Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for a great victory. The Blackburn Firebrand is remembered for missing the war entirely. Conceived as a naval fighter, rebuilt as a torpedo carrier, and delivered only after the guns fell silent in 1945, it is one of...
Share this story For a few days in the autumn of 1953, the fastest aircraft on Earth was British, and it was called the Supermarine Swift. Then the same aircraft became one of the most embarrassing fighters the Royal Air Force ever bought. The Swift is the rare jet...
Share this story The Gloster Javelin was a first and a warning wrapped in one big delta wing. It was the Royal Air Force’s first purpose-built all-weather interceptor and Britain’s first delta-winged fighter — a genuinely modern machine for the early...
Share this story Britain’s second jet fighter was, in part, made of wood. It had two tail booms instead of one fuselage, an engine that sat behind the pilot like a barrel, and a plywood nose that traced its ancestry straight back to the Mosquito. It looked...
Share this story In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks,...
Share this story By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other...
Partagez cette histoire. En décembre 1941, un ingénieur allemand remit au ministère de l'Air du Reich un rapport de plusieurs centaines de pages décrivant une méthode pour bombarder New York depuis la limite de l'espace. L'arme serait lancée depuis un rail de trois kilomètres, propulsée par une fusée jusqu'à la frontière de l'atmosphère à une certaine altitude….
Partagez cette histoire. Le 9 juillet 1961, un énorme quadriréacteur a survolé en grondant l'aérodrome de Tushino, près de Moscou, flanqué de deux MiG-21. Les observateurs occidentaux, le cou tendu, ont sorti leurs carnets. Voilà, semblait-il, la preuve que l'Union soviétique avait construit….
Share this story On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one...
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet climbed at more than 3,600 metres per minute — so fast that Allied bomber crews, seeing it for the first time in the summer of 1944, could scarcely track it. In a single breathtaking arc it could reach the bombers,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed...
Share this story Airshow order announcements are usually about aeroplanes. One of the largest deals of Farnborough’s opening day involved no aircraft at all. BOC Aviation, the Singapore-based lessor, signed for as many as 300 CFM LEAP engines — up to 200 LEAP-1A...
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