Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was to come looking...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
At 3:46 in the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1935, a four-engined flying boat lifted off the water at Alameda, California, and set course west across an ocean that no aeroplane had ever crossed on a schedule. Around twenty thousand people were standing on the shore...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
In 1937 Focke-Wulf flew a fighter that was roughly 80 km/h faster than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 then in service, using exactly the same engines. It had twice the range. It weighed twice as much and still outran the thing it was compared against. Nine were built. The...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Put two engines in a fighter and you normally end up with something like a Bf 110: two nacelles, one on each wing, and an aeroplane that is bigger than the thing it is trying to shoot down. Kawasaki tried a different answer. They put one engine in front of the pilot...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Every helicopter pilot knows the problem with ejecting from a helicopter. Above your head, turning at several hundred revolutions per minute, are the blades. Fire yourself upwards and you go through them. Which is why, in more than a century of rotary flight, only one...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the night of 21 September 1993, a decorated Soviet combat pilot climbed onto the podium of the Russian parliament and, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, swore himself in as President of Russia. Five years earlier, the same man had been hanging in a parachute...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third world war came close...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in the USSR, but...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Leading Aircraftman Leonard Fuller was 22 years old, three months into flight training, and had just been landed on by another aeroplane. Not hit. Landed on. The Avro Anson underneath him had driven its gun turret into his port wing root and stuck there, its fin and...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet Atlantic is the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany chose it in 2022...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a stretch of forest...
Commentaires récents