Partagez cette histoire. Le matin du 21 septembre 1953, sur la base aérienne de Kimpo, un avion à réaction à ailes en flèche s'apprêtait à atterrir. Les pilotes le prirent pour un de leurs F-86 Sabre. Il s'agissait en réalité d'un MiG-15 de fabrication soviétique, arborant encore les étoiles rouges nord-coréennes….
Share this story On Christmas Eve 1944, American troops dug in near Liège heard something wrong in the sky. Not the familiar growl of piston engines, but a smooth, piercing roar. Sleek aircraft swept overhead, dropped their bombs, and simply accelerated away....
Partagez cette histoire. Il s'agissait de la mission de sauvetage la plus minutieusement répétée de l'histoire militaire américaine moderne — et elle n'a sauvé personne. Dans l'obscurité de l'aube du 21 novembre 1970, une force de frappe conjointe de l'armée de terre et de l'armée de l'air a pénétré de 37 kilomètres à l'intérieur du Nord-Vietnam, passant juste devant...
Share this story On the morning of 7 August 1945 — the day after Hiroshima — a small, silver twin-jet lifted off the runway at Kisarazu Naval Air Base. For about twenty minutes, Lieutenant Commander Susumu Takaoka flew Japan’s first jet aircraft, the...
Share this story In the 1930s the Atlantic was aviation’s unconquered ocean. Airships had crossed it, but no commercial heavier-than-air machine could carry paying cargo the whole way in a single hop. The physics was brutally simple: a flying boat heavy enough...
Share this story For most of the last thirty years, the answer to “who builds America’s fighter jets?” was almost boringly simple. Lockheed Martin built the stealth fighters, and everyone else competed for what was left. Then, in the space of about...
Share this story For twenty years the Atlantic had been killing balloonists. Since 1958, five men had died trying to drift across it, and every attempt — more than a dozen of them — had ended in the sea. Then, in August 1978, three amateurs from Albuquerque climbed...
Share this story It is one of the Second World War’s most durable legends: that in January 1944 a giant six-engined German bomber took off from occupied France, crossed the Atlantic, flew to within sight of Manhattan, photographed the skyline, and slipped home...
Share this story By 1944, Germany’s bomber fleets were spent, and the V-1 flying bomb — the “buzz bomb” — was terrorising London with one glaring flaw: it could miss a target the size of Greater London entirely. Someone proposed a brutally simple fix...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps put out a request for something deliberately radical — a fighter that broke the rules of how a fighter should be built. Vultee’s answer was the XP-54: a twin-boom machine with an inverted gull wing, the engine and...
Share this story In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio...
Share this story A little over a year before he became the first human being to set foot on another world, Neil Armstrong very nearly died a mile from his own desk — in one of the strangest, ugliest flying machines NASA ever built. On 6 May 1968, he ejected from the...
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