Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story On 27 June 1969, a North American B-25 Mitchell lifted off from Fairbanks, Alaska, lost an engine moments later, and came down wheels-up on a sandbar in the middle of the Tanana River. Everyone walked away. The bomber did not. Recovering it would have...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Imagine strapping into a fighter, climbing to altitude, and then flying straight at a bomber whose gunners have been ordered to open fire on you. Not blanks. Not a camera. Real bullets, aimed at your aircraft, on purpose. Now imagine doing it two or...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story In 1964, France joined the nuclear club on its own terms. Refusing to depend on American or British weapons, it built a sleek supersonic delta to carry its own bomb — a two-seat, twin-engined thoroughbred that could dash toward Moscow at twice...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story Most Vietnam-era warplanes are long gone — melted into scrap or bolted to a museum pole. The OV-10 Bronco keeps refusing to leave. Built to fight guerrillas in the 1960s, the funny little twin-boom turboprop has come roaring back again and...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story By a decades-old agreement between the U.S. services, the Army isn’t really supposed to fly its own combat aeroplanes — that job belongs to the Air Force. The Grumman OV-1 Mohawk is the great exception: a stubby, triple-tailed, bug-eyed...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Everyone remembers the Airbus A380 as the great double-decker of the skies. Almost nobody remembers that France built one two generations earlier. In 1953, Air France put into service a broad-shouldered, four-engined airliner with two full passenger...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story In the opening minutes of Octopussy (1983), Roger Moore’s James Bond escapes an exploding hangar in a jet barely bigger than he is, outruns a heat-seeking missile, then coasts up to a petrol station and deadpans: “Fill her up,...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Share this story In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Share this story Most water bombers are propeller aircraft, and for good reason: they fly low and slow over fires, scooping and dropping in tight mountain valleys. The Beriev Be-200 does it all on jet power. It skims a lake at nearly 220 km/h, swallows 12 tonnes of...
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