Share this story Somebody in the Soviet Ministry of Aircraft Industry decided that what agriculture needed was a jet. Not a jet trainer, not a jet transport. A jet crop-duster. A biplane one. The PZL M-15 Belphegor is the only jet-powered biplane ever put into series...
Share this story The Junkers G.38 had a wing two metres thick at the root. Junkers, being Junkers, looked at that volume and decided it was a waste to fill it with nothing but structure. So they put passengers in it. On the second aircraft, six people sat inside the...
Share this story If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as...
Condividi questa storia Quattro biplani a cabina aperta partirono da Seattle il 6 aprile 1924 per compiere il giro del mondo. Non avevano radio. I loro motori erano dei Liberty V-12, surplus bellico. I loro equipaggi si orientavano con mappa, bussola e costa, e quando dovevano attraversare un oceano...
Condividi questa storia L'Oceano Pacifico è la più grande formazione terrestre. Nel 1928 nessuno l'aveva ancora sorvolato, e il motivo era puramente aritmetico: le distanze tra i punti di approdo utilizzabili erano superiori a quelle che qualsiasi aereo potesse coprire in modo affidabile, e se si mancava l'isola...
Share this story When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open...
Condividi questa storia Nel 1926, un operaio di un giacimento petrolifero in Oklahoma si colpì all'occhio sinistro con una scheggia di metallo e lo perse. Sette anni dopo, lo stesso uomo fece il giro del mondo in solitaria in meno di otto giorni, e poi andò alla ricerca dei confini dell'atmosfera. Wiley Post ne ha raccontato una storia...
Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
Share this story Look at a Blohm & Voss BV 141 head-on and your brain files a complaint. The engine and the tail are on the left. The crew sit in a glass pod on the right. There is no fuselage in the middle, because there is no middle. It looks like two different...
Condividi questa storia Nessun aereo è mai sembrato più veloce da fermo. Il Douglas X-3 Stiletto era lungo sessantasette piedi come un ago, con un muso che avresti potuto usare per aprire le lettere e ali così piccole da sembrare un ripensamento. Tutto in esso prometteva Mach 2. Esso...
Share this story On 2 June 1944, B-17s of the Fifteenth Air Force bombed marshalling yards in Hungary and then kept going east. They landed in Ukraine, at three Soviet airfields the Red Army had handed over to the Americans. It was the first time in the war that a...
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