Share this story On paper, the Yakovlev Yak-38 looked like Moscow’s answer to the Harrier: a jet that could rise straight off a deck with no catapult, hover, and land vertically. In practice it was one of the most compromised combat aircraft of the Cold War.The...
Share this story Before dawn on New Year’s Day 1945, while much of the Allied camp slept off its celebrations, hundreds of German fighters lifted off in near-total silence. No radios. Incomplete maps. Pilots who, in many cases, had been told only minutes earlier...
Partagez cette histoire. Il avait vingt et un ans, était le fils d'un mineur de cuivre de Phoenix, avec une allure de boxeur et une fâcheuse tendance à désobéir aux ordres. En septembre dernier, à la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, le sous-lieutenant Frank Luke Jr. devint le chasseur de ballons le plus redouté….
Share this story Grumman built the F8F Bearcat around one brutal idea: take the biggest engine America had and wrap the smallest possible aeroplane around it. The result was less a fighter than an engine with a saddle — an 18-cylinder radial hauling a...
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...
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