Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Le Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet grimpait à plus de 3 600 mètres par minute, une vitesse telle que les équipages des bombardiers alliés, l'apercevant pour la première fois durant l'été 1944, pouvaient à peine le suivre. En un seul arc de cercle époustouflant, il pouvait atteindre les bombardiers, ouvrir le feu et disparaître.
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At the height of the Battle of Britain, with his fighter pilots being blamed for the bombers falling out of the sky, a young German ace was asked by the head of the Luftwaffe what he needed to turn things around. Adolf Galland, cigar clenched in his teeth, gave an...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Il abattit plus d'avions ennemis que n'importe quel autre chasseur allié de la Première Guerre mondiale, et il causa la mort d'un nombre effroyable de jeunes hommes envoyés pour le piloter, avant même qu'ils n'affrontent un Allemand. Le Sopwith Camel était le meilleur chasseur de 1917 et un véritable piège….
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell into the sea,...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes anyway. The...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At 5:55 on the evening of Friday 4 October 1918, a small biplane with cardboard wings and a papier-mâché body lifted off a wheeled dolly running down a portable track near Dayton, Ohio. There was nobody aboard and nobody controlling it. It was supposed to fly a preset...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human’s for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first. The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a helium balloon...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed was one half of...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers on the front and...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good whatsoever, because...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At 02:19 on 21 November 1970, an American helicopter deliberately flew itself into the trees inside a North Vietnamese prison camp twenty-three miles from Hanoi. Its rotor blades chewed through forty-foot foliage and it came down hard in a courtyard roughly the size...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the evening of 14 October 1973, a C-5A Galaxy touched down at Lod airport outside Tel Aviv carrying 97 tons of 105 mm howitzer shells. Roughly a hundred miles to the south-west, the largest tank battle since Kursk was being fought, and the Israeli army was running...
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