Share this story Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for...
Share this story On August 3, 1945, a Japanese test pilot named Masayoshi Tsuruno climbed into the strangest fighter prototype Japan had ever built and pushed the throttle forward. The aircraft trundled along the runway at Kyūshū Aircraft Company’s Mushiroda...
Share this story If you ever stand in front of the gigantic Cold War hangar at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, you will see, parked between an XB-70 Valkyrie and a YF-12, something that looks like it landed there yesterday — a domed...
Share this story In 1960, in a hangar at the Bell Aircraft plant at Niagara Falls, New York, Bell unveiled the wildest single-seat fighter ever proposed by an American manufacturer. It had a needle-nosed fuselage, two wing-tip nacelles that could swivel through 100...
Le 1er août 1955, Tony LeVier fit décoller un étrange appareil Lockheed d'un lac asséché du désert du Nevada. L'avion possédait des ailes incroyablement longues et étroites – comme un planeur motorisé – et était propulsé par un unique réacteur. Il montait à une vitesse fulgurante, comme aucun autre appareil qu'il ait jamais piloté….
Share this story On 10 September 1956, in the high desert above Edwards Air Force Base, North American Aviation's chief test pilot Bob Baker pushed the throttle of an aircraft nobody outside the U.S. Air Force fighter procurement office had ever heard of into...
Share this story In late 1958, in the high Texas sky over Naval Air Station Dallas, Vought's chief test pilot John Konrad flew an aircraft that could outmanoeuvre, outclimb, outrun and outturn the future F-4 Phantom II. The aircraft had a single engine. It had no...
Share this story Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy...
Share this story Helicopters do something fixed-wing aircraft cannot. They land on rooftops, in jungles, on the back of a destroyer, on a forest road, on a Pacific atoll smaller than a basketball court. The price they pay is speed. A helicopter that cruises at 150...
La manœuvre était impossible. Bob Hoover décollait à bord de son Rockwell Shrike Commander — un avion d'affaires bimoteur, et non un avion de voltige — prenait de l'altitude, puis coupait les deux moteurs. Ensuite, porté par sa seule inertie et la gravité, il effectuait une boucle et….
Share this story On the morning of 18 June 1914 — ten years and six months after Orville Wright lifted off Kitty Hawk — a 21-year-old American named Lawrence Burst Sperry flew a Curtiss C-2 biplane down the Seine at 50 feet above the water in front of a crowd of...
Le 13 septembre 1935, Howard Hughes prit place dans le cockpit d'un élégant avion de course argenté de sa propre conception et le pilota à 567,2 km/h (352,39 mph) sur un parcours balisé à Santa Ana, en Californie – une vitesse jamais atteinte par un avion terrestre dans l'histoire. Il avait 29 ans et avait déjà….
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