Lockheed XF-90: The Fighter Too Tough to Kill
There is an aeroplane in the Cold War Gallery at Dayton that the museum has deliberately not restored. Its wings are off. Its nose is crushed. The paint is scorched.The Lockheed XF-90 lost its competition, never entered production, and was officially recorded as...
Hanna Reitsch: The Test Pilot Who Flew Everything the Reich Built
In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and Hanna Reitsch flew it...
Flat Spin: The F-14 Mode That Ends in Ejection
The most famous three minutes in aviation cinema are a flat spin. An F-14 departs, settles into a flat rotation, and the crew ejects into the canopy.The remarkable thing about that scene is not the drama. It is that the US Navy’s own flight manual describes...
ShinMaywa US-2: The Flying Boat That Lands in 3-Metre Waves
On 21 June 2013, a yacht called Eolus struck a sperm whale roughly 1,200 kilometres south-east of Miyagi prefecture and began to sink. Two men took to a life raft: a Japanese newscaster and a blind sailor attempting to cross the Pacific.A US-2 launched from Iwakuni at...
Energy-Maneuverability: How John Boyd Rewrote the Dogfight
At Nellis Air Force Base in the late 1950s, an instructor kept a standing bet with anyone who wanted it. Take up a position on his tail, the classic winning position in air combat. He would be reversed and behind you inside forty seconds, or he would pay you forty...
Ground Effect: The Cushion of Air That Isn’t Really There
Every pilot has felt it. The aeroplane is descending toward the runway, the flare begins, and somewhere in the last few feet the whole machine seems to change its mind about landing. It floats. It sits there, refusing to settle, eating runway.The usual explanation is...
Terrain-Following Radar: Flying at 200 Feet in the Dark
The U-2 shootdown over Sverdlovsk in 1960 settled an argument. Altitude was no longer sanctuary. If you wanted to reach a defended target, you would have to go under the radar rather than over it, at night, in weather, at a few hundred feet.Which raises an immediate...
Wake Turbulence: The Invisible Tornado Behind Every Airliner
On 7 January 2017, a Bombardier Challenger 604 was cruising at 34,000 feet over the Arabian Sea, roughly 500 nautical miles from the nearest land. An Emirates A380 passed 1,000 feet overhead in the opposite direction, entirely legally.Forty-seven seconds later the...
Mach Tuck: The Dive That Nearly Killed the First Jet Pilots
In October 1947, Chuck Yeager pulled back on the control column of the Bell X-1 at Mach 0.94 and nothing happened. The aircraft carried on exactly as before, as though the stick were not connected to anything.He shut down the rocket motor. As the X-1 slowed, the...
Compressor Stall: Why a Jet Engine Coughs Fire
A jet engine is a machine for keeping air moving in one direction. When it briefly stops doing that, the result is spectacular: a bang like an explosion, a sheet of flame out of the tailpipe, sometimes out of the intake as well, and an aircraft that has just lost a...
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