Partagez cette histoire. Il s'agissait de la mission de sauvetage la plus minutieusement répétée de l'histoire militaire américaine moderne — et elle n'a sauvé personne. Dans l'obscurité de l'aube du 21 novembre 1970, une force de frappe conjointe de l'armée de terre et de l'armée de l'air a pénétré de 37 kilomètres à l'intérieur du Nord-Vietnam, passant juste devant...
Share this story On the morning of 7 August 1945 — the day after Hiroshima — a small, silver twin-jet lifted off the runway at Kisarazu Naval Air Base. For about twenty minutes, Lieutenant Commander Susumu Takaoka flew Japan’s first jet aircraft, the...
Share this story In the 1930s the Atlantic was aviation’s unconquered ocean. Airships had crossed it, but no commercial heavier-than-air machine could carry paying cargo the whole way in a single hop. The physics was brutally simple: a flying boat heavy enough...
Share this story For most of the last thirty years, the answer to “who builds America’s fighter jets?” was almost boringly simple. Lockheed Martin built the stealth fighters, and everyone else competed for what was left. Then, in the space of about...
Share this story It is one of the Second World War’s most durable legends: that in January 1944 a giant six-engined German bomber took off from occupied France, crossed the Atlantic, flew to within sight of Manhattan, photographed the skyline, and slipped home...
Share this story By 1944, Germany’s bomber fleets were spent, and the V-1 flying bomb — the “buzz bomb” — was terrorising London with one glaring flaw: it could miss a target the size of Greater London entirely. Someone proposed a brutally simple fix...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps put out a request for something deliberately radical — a fighter that broke the rules of how a fighter should be built. Vultee’s answer was the XP-54: a twin-boom machine with an inverted gull wing, the engine and...
Share this story In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio...
Partagez cette histoire. Il avait 31 ans – un âge vénérable pour un pilote de chasse – et c’est ainsi que Gregory Boyington, un Marine alcoolique et deux fois divorcé, reçut le surnom de “ Pappy ”. En 1943, il était aussi presque fini : un ancien Tigre Volant….
Share this story He was born in Brazil, to a father from Alsace and a mother from Lorraine, and learned to fly at a club in Rio. He would end the war a wing commander in the Royal Air Force at the age of twenty-four, and General de Gaulle would call him...
Partagez cette histoire. Il était un peu moins de 21 heures, le soir du 18 avril 1995, et le capitaine Brian Udell pilotait son F-15E Strike Eagle au-dessus de l'Atlantique, au large de la Caroline du Nord. À ses côtés se trouvait son officier des systèmes d'armes, le capitaine Dennis White. C'était une mission de routine….
Share this story At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later,...
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