Share this story At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard,...
Share this story At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks...
Share this story On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that...
Share this story On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then...
Le document le plus important de l'histoire des avions furtifs n'a pas été rédigé en Californie ni sur un aérodrome secret en plein désert. Il a été écrit à Moscou, en russe, par un physicien soviétique – et l'Union soviétique a autorisé sa diffusion à l'étranger car elle estimait que ce travail était sans intérêt….
Regardez le flanc du navire et vous le verrez : le fantôme d'un avion. Deux ailes, un fuselage, même les jambes d'un train d'atterrissage fixe — la silhouette grandeur nature d'un appareil, imprimée sur l'acier gris de la marine. C'est l'une des photographies les plus étranges et les plus troublantes...
Dans l'histoire des avions de chasse, on oublie presque toujours le finaliste. L'appareil qui perd la compétition se voit attribuer une plaque commémorative dans un musée, s'il a de la chance, tandis que le vainqueur obtient la production en série. Le Northrop YF-17 Cobra est la grande exception. Il a perdu – et pourtant….
Il y a les gros avions, et puis il y avait le Mriya. Se tenir sous un Boeing 747, c'est se sentir petit. Se tenir sous un An-225, c'est le 747 qui paraît minuscule. Pendant 33 ans, un seul exemplaire de cette machine a existé : un géant soviétique à six moteurs conçu pour un seul avion….
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter...
Share this story In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico...
Share this story On a May morning in 1957, over the Pacific near Christmas Island, a Vickers Valiant called XD818 opened its bomb bay and released a device that fell away, dropped for long seconds, and then turned the sky white. Britain had just become a thermonuclear...
Share this story Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined...
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