Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
Partagez cette histoire. Regardez un Blohm & Voss BV 141 de face et votre cerveau proteste. Le moteur et l'empennage sont à gauche. L'équipage est installé dans une nacelle vitrée à droite. Il n'y a pas de fuselage au milieu, car il n'y a pas de milieu. On dirait deux appareils différents….
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Partagez cette histoire. Le 2 juin 1944, des B-17 de la Quinzième Air Force bombardèrent des gares de triage en Hongrie, puis poursuivirent leur route vers l'est. Ils atterrirent en Ukraine, sur trois aérodromes soviétiques que l'Armée rouge avait remis aux Américains. C'était la première fois de la guerre que….
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
Share this story The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF’s great four-engine heavy bombers — into service before the Halifax, before the Lancaster, the aircraft that opened Britain’s strategic bombing war. It was huge, handsome and, in the end,...
Partagez cet article. Lorsque les MiG-15 de fabrication soviétique ont survolé la Corée à la fin des années 1950, avec leurs ailes en flèche et leur forte pente ascensionnelle, l'US Navy s'est trouvée face à un problème. Son meilleur avion embarqué, le Grumman F9F Panther, était une machine performante et robuste, mais son aile droite….
Partagez cette histoire. Au début des années 1950, les États-Unis passaient des nuits blanches à craindre les bombardiers soviétiques qui traversaient l'Arctique dans l'obscurité. L'avion qu'ils déployaient en urgence pour les intercepter était le Lockheed F-94 Starfire, le premier chasseur à réaction américain doté d'un….
Share this story In 1935 a newspaper baron dared British industry to build the fastest civil aircraft in Europe. The result was so quick that when the Royal Air Force turned it into a bomber, it could outrun its own fighters. Two years later that same design flew the...
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