Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock. His right wing root...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
On a Tuesday evening in September 1909, in the hills behind Piedmont, California, a Chinese machinist took off in a biplane he had designed, built and powered with an engine he had also built, and flew an elliptical circuit around a hilltop for about twenty minutes...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
She had held a pilot’s licence for thirteen months and had forty hours of flying in her logbook, total. The aeroplane was a wood-and-fabric trainer with an eighty-horsepower rotary engine and a service ceiling of about 4,300 metres. Aconcagua, off to her right,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
In 1969 the Chinese air force asked for a fighter small enough to be carried on the back of a truck. The idea was that in a war on Chinese soil, airfields would be bombed flat within days. What survived would be whatever could be hidden, dispersed and flown off short...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast off, came...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets. Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets behind their seats....
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
In 1965 the Republic of China Air Force built two graves at the Bitan military cemetery outside Taipei. One was for Major Yeh Changti, the other for Major Chang Liyi. Both men had been shot down over communist China. Both had been declared dead. The Central Daily News...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished. Seventeen men had been on board. A week later,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 4 December 1956, an Italian test pilot pointed a small silver aeroplane downhill from above 40,000 feet and became the first man to take an Italian-designed, Italian-built aircraft through the sound barrier. The aircraft was the Aerfer Sagittario 2. Two were built....
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as two. They were not...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it. Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for its state...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
In the summer of 1986 the largest aircraft in the world sat on a ramp at Lakehurst, New Jersey, three quarters of a mile from where the Hindenburg had burned. It was 343 feet long. It was a Navy blimp with four helicopters bolted underneath it. On 1 July it lifted a...
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