In September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft in the world took to the skies over southwest England. The Bristol Brabazon was a colossus — its 230-foot wingspan exceeded that of a modern Boeing 747. It was powered by eight radial engines coupled in pairs to drive...
On April 25, 1982, a collection of British helicopters did something that hadn’t been done since World War II: they put a submarine out of action from the air. The target was ARA Santa Fe, an Argentine submarine caught on the surface near South Georgia Island...
On August 17, 1943, the United States Eighth Air Force launched what would become one of the most devastating bombing missions in the history of aerial warfare. The target was Germany’s ball bearing industry — a chokepoint that Allied planners believed could...
On May 10, 1970, an SR-71A Blackbird designated 61-7969 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. It would never return. What happened in the skies over Southeast Asia that day remains one of...
Share this story On the evening of 4 March 1957, a US Navy patrol blimp lifted off the apron at Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and pointed itself east, towards the Atlantic Ocean. Its envelope was 343 feet long. Its registration was Bureau Number...
Share this story Somewhere outside the Siberian town of Abakan, in the Republic of Khakassia, there is a packed-snow airstrip about 200 metres long. It is the only way to get into a village called Nizhny Kurlugash in the winter months. The strip is serviced, twice a...
Share this story On 23 February 2004, the Acting Secretary of the Army — a former Senate staffer and Vietnam veteran named Les Brownlee — stood at a Pentagon podium with the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, and announced the cancellation of...
Share this story On the morning of 4 December 1958, two men climbed into a slightly modified, four-seat Cessna 172 at McCarran Field on the southern edge of Las Vegas. The airplane was painted in the cream-and-script livery of the Hacienda Hotel, a Strip resort that...
Share this story Beauty in aviation is a real engineering property. The aircraft that pilots, photographers, and aviation historians consistently call the most beautiful are not pretty by accident — they are pretty because every line, every fairing, every panel break...
Share this story Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in...
Share this story If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling...
Share this story The plan was a knockout punch. Tarrant of Byfleet, Surrey — a firm of timber merchants — would build the largest aircraft in the world, fly it from England to Berlin, and bomb the Kaiser into submission. The aircraft would have three wings to spread...
Recent Comments