Partagez cette histoire. Durant l'été 1940, les pilotes de chasse de la RAF, pourtant en infériorité numérique, se retrouvaient invariablement au bon endroit pour affronter la Luftwaffe. Pour les Allemands, cela ressemblait à une chance incroyable. Il n'en était rien. Le long des côtes britanniques se dressait une ligne de….
Partagez cette histoire. Par une douce nuit d'été 1915, les Londoniens levèrent les yeux de leurs rues plongées dans l'obscurité et entendirent un son jamais entendu auparavant : le vrombissement régulier de moteurs surgissant des ténèbres, haut dans le ciel. Quelques instants plus tard, des bombes commencèrent à tomber….
Partagez cette histoire. Au printemps dernier, pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, des enfants néerlandais couraient dans les champs tandis que les bombardiers britanniques vrombissaient au-dessus de leurs têtes, non pas pour se cacher, mais pour leur faire signe. Car ces Lancaster ne transportaient pas de bombes. Ils larguaient du pain, de la viande en conserve et du chocolat….
Partagez cette histoire. Dans la nuit du 17 août 1943, Wernher von Braun, ingénieur en aérospatiale, rentra à son logement sur une portion tranquille de la côte baltique allemande et leva les yeux. La pleine lune brillait au-dessus de Peenemünde, ville de recherche secrète. Puis les premières fusées éclairantes….
Share this story On the morning of 25 October 1999, a small charter jet lifted off from Orlando bound for Dallas. It was an ordinary hop for six ordinary reasons, a golfer, his agents, a course designer, and two pilots, all with places to be. Within minutes, something...
Share this story Long Beach harbor, the morning of 2 November 1947, smelled of salt, diesel and quiet disappointment. Bobbing in the channel was the largest flying machine humanity had ever bolted together: a wooden flying boat the length of two-thirds of a football...
Share this story On the morning of 15 April 1969, a lumbering four-engine reconnaissance aircraft climbed away from a Japanese airfield on a mission its crew had flown, in one form or another, roughly 200 times in three months without incident. It was routine. It was...
Share this story On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and...
Share this story Above the Sea of Japan the air was thin and lethally cold, the clouds below him packed like dirty cotton. It was Royce Williams’ second flight of the day, 18 November 1952, and his Grumman Panther was clawing past 12,000 feet when the radio...
Share this story Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in...
Share this story Decades before the V-22 Osprey, America built an aircraft that could lift off vertically like a helicopter, then cruise at over 400 mph like an airliner — by rotating its entire wing. It worked. It was decades ahead of its time. And almost...
Share this story In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the...
Recent Comments