Share this story The North American XB-70 Valkyrie was supposed to be the future of strategic bombing — a six-engine colossus that could outrun anything in the sky at three times the speed of sound. Instead, it became one of aviation’s most expensive...
Share this story City to city, with no airports. Take off from a small concrete pad in central London, climb vertically, transition forward, cruise at 190 miles per hour, descend, land on a concrete pad in central Paris. No taxi, no train, no airport security. In June...
Share this story The photograph looks fake. A short-fuselage Soviet-era twin-engine airliner — a Tupolev Tu-134, the workhorse of Aeroflot domestic routes for thirty years — is hanging in midair beneath a single helicopter. The Tu-134 weighs about 28 tonnes empty. It...
Share this story The most ambitious naval aviation concept the United States ever fielded was not the nuclear-powered supercarrier. It was a 785-foot helium airship with an interior hangar bay full of biplane fighters that could be launched and recovered in flight....
Share this story On 22 May 1946, in a hangar at Downsview Airport just outside Toronto, a small all-metal trainer painted in pale yellow finished its last ground checks, taxied to the runway, and lifted off into Canadian spring weather. The pilot was Pat Fillingham, a...
Share this story Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for...
Share this story On August 3, 1945, a Japanese test pilot named Masayoshi Tsuruno climbed into the strangest fighter prototype Japan had ever built and pushed the throttle forward. The aircraft trundled along the runway at Kyūshū Aircraft Company’s Mushiroda...
Share this story If you ever stand in front of the gigantic Cold War hangar at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, you will see, parked between an XB-70 Valkyrie and a YF-12, something that looks like it landed there yesterday — a domed...
Share this story In 1960, in a hangar at the Bell Aircraft plant at Niagara Falls, New York, Bell unveiled the wildest single-seat fighter ever proposed by an American manufacturer. It had a needle-nosed fuselage, two wing-tip nacelles that could swivel through 100...
Le 1er août 1955, Tony LeVier fit décoller un étrange appareil Lockheed d'un lac asséché du désert du Nevada. L'avion possédait des ailes incroyablement longues et étroites – comme un planeur motorisé – et était propulsé par un unique réacteur. Il montait à une vitesse fulgurante, comme aucun autre appareil qu'il ait jamais piloté….
Share this story On 10 September 1956, in the high desert above Edwards Air Force Base, North American Aviation's chief test pilot Bob Baker pushed the throttle of an aircraft nobody outside the U.S. Air Force fighter procurement office had ever heard of into...
Share this story In late 1958, in the high Texas sky over Naval Air Station Dallas, Vought's chief test pilot John Konrad flew an aircraft that could outmanoeuvre, outclimb, outrun and outturn the future F-4 Phantom II. The aircraft had a single engine. It had no...
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