Share this story The A Shau valley, 10 March 1966. A Special Forces camp is being overrun by two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. The hills either side rise fifteen hundred feet and the cloud base is at eight hundred, which means any aircraft coming to help has to...
Partagez cet article. Tous les débats sur les avions de combat autonomes finissent par aboutir à la même question, et elle n'est pas d'ordre technique. Il s'agit de savoir si le pilote fera confiance à l'appareil qui évolue sous son aile. Frank Kendall, qui dirigeait l'US Air Force à l'époque...
Share this story The air base is named after a man who died in an aeroplane. Lieutenant Muwaffaq Salti was a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, killed in combat with Israeli fighters on 13 November 1966 during the Battle of Samu. Jordan gave his name to the base at...
Share this story If you happened to be at Birmingham Airport on the afternoon of 15 July, you would have seen something that looked like a mistake: a Boeing 737 with a large rectangular fin bolted to its spine, painted an unlovely metallic green, climbing out over the...
Share this story On 28 May 2017, a photographer at Miho Air Base in western Japan took a picture of a Kawasaki C-2 transport, tail number 68-1203. It was an unremarkable aeroplane doing an unremarkable thing: a high-winged, T-tailed freighter on a ramp, clean-lined...
Partagez cet article. Il y a deux semaines, l'actualité était marquée par le retour des avions à leur base. Des Raptors quittaient le Golfe pour l'Angleterre, des escadrons étaient relevés, et le cessez-le-feu était suffisamment respecté pour que l'US Air Force puisse réduire sa présence dans la région. Cela n'a duré que très peu de temps….
Share this story On the morning of 16 July, two French Rafales and two Luftwaffe Eurofighter Typhoons met in European airspace and took fuel from a French A330 Phenix tanker. No weapons were carried. The manoeuvres were unremarkable. Any air force in NATO does this on...
Partagez cette histoire. À l'automne 1980, des ingénieurs américains ont fixé trente roquettes sur un C-130 Hercules. Le plan était à la fois insensé et d'un sérieux implacable : faire atterrir le quadriréacteur dans un stade de football au cœur de Téhéran, l'immobiliser à l'intérieur du terrain, charger….
Share this story In the late 1950s the US Army went looking for a machine that no one had ever quite built: something between a jeep and a helicopter. A flying jeep — a simple platform a soldier could stand on, lift straight up, and buzz over a battlefield. It sounds...
Share this story On paper, the Rockwell XFV-12 was a dream: a supersonic, Mach-2 fighter that could rise straight up off a small ship’s deck, fight like an F-4 Phantom, and land vertically in a space no runway could offer. The US Navy wanted it badly. Rockwell...
Share this story For a single year, Italy believed it had built the first jet aeroplane in history. On 27 August 1940, a sleek, barrel-shaped machine howled into the sky over Milan with no propeller anywhere to be seen — and the world’s aviation authority duly...
Share this story In 1942, someone at General Motors had a tidy idea: instead of designing a new fighter from scratch, why not bolt one together from parts of aircraft that already existed? Take a Mustang’s wings, a dive-bomber’s tail, a Corsair’s landing gear, wrap...
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