Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind the wings, lying...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them beside it. They...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
C'est le soir du 27 octobre 1962, et à bord du sous-marin soviétique B-59, quelque part au nord de Cuba, la température a dépassé les 45 degrés Celsius et l'air se raréfie. Les batteries sont presque à plat. Des hommes s'évanouissent à leurs postes. Pendant des heures, les sous-mariniers américains...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the Americans had...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of Faro and came to...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
In the autumn of 1932, a small, barrel-chested aeroplane painted red and white sat on a Cleveland airfield looking less like an aircraft than a cartoon of one. It was almost all engine — a giant radial nose bolted to a stubby fuselage, with the cockpit shoved so far...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and again, while the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
From the moment humans first left the ground, a certain kind of pilot has asked a dangerous question: what happens if I try this? The answers fill the wildest chapter of aviation history — a century of loops, rolls, dives and impossible threading of gaps, flown by men...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Quelque part au-dessus du centre de la France, à la fin des années 1950, le pilote d'essai André Turcat pousse un étrange avion à aile delta au-delà de la vitesse à laquelle un réacteur classique commence à s'essouffler. C'est alors que le Nord Griffon prend vie. Derrière lui, un statoréacteur de la taille d'un petit….
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
There is a sound a Lockheed P-38 Lightning makes that no other warbird can — two Allison V-12s, turbo-supercharged, humming in eerie harmony as the twin-boom fighter slides overhead. For most enthusiasts, hearing it once in a lifetime is a gift. This July at Oshkosh,...
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