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...
Partagez cette histoire. Il avait 31 ans – un âge vénérable pour un pilote de chasse – et c’est ainsi que Gregory Boyington, un Marine alcoolique et deux fois divorcé, reçut le surnom de “ Pappy ”. En 1943, il était aussi presque fini : un ancien Tigre Volant….
Share this story He was born in Brazil, to a father from Alsace and a mother from Lorraine, and learned to fly at a club in Rio. He would end the war a wing commander in the Royal Air Force at the age of twenty-four, and General de Gaulle would call him...
Partagez cette histoire. Il était un peu moins de 21 heures, le soir du 18 avril 1995, et le capitaine Brian Udell pilotait son F-15E Strike Eagle au-dessus de l'Atlantique, au large de la Caroline du Nord. À ses côtés se trouvait son officier des systèmes d'armes, le capitaine Dennis White. C'était une mission de routine….
Share this story At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later,...
Share this story Some warplanes make their name in dogfights, twisting through the sky with guns blazing. The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo made most of its name doing the opposite: flying low, flying flat out, and flying completely unarmed straight over the people trying to...
Share this story Some aircraft impress by their cleverness. The Tupolev Tu-160 impresses first by its sheer dimensions. At 54.1 metres (177 ft 6 in) it is longer than a Boeing B-52, and when its wings are spread it measures 55.7 metres (182 ft 9 in) from tip to tip....
Share this story Every so often aviation history throws up an aircraft whose greatest achievement was simply existing. The Bell P-59 Airacomet is the patron saint of that club. It was America’s first jet aircraft, a genuine milestone, and yet it was so...
Share this story Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to...
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