Un MV-22B Osprey del Corpo dei Marines a bordo di una nave d'assalto anfibio della Marina. Il convertiplano ha sostituito il CH-46 Sea Knight nel ruolo d'assalto e il C-2 Greyhound nel ruolo di trasporto su portaerei. (US Navy / Wikimedia Commons) Il Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey avrebbe dovuto...
Cinquant'anni fa, il 1° luglio 1976, il National Air and Space Museum dello Smithsonian aprì le sue porte sul National Mall di Washington, DC. Fu un dono per il bicentenario a una nazione che aveva appena portato l'uomo sulla Luna, vinto la corsa allo spazio e costruito un...
Nel settembre del 1967, un goffo aereo turboelica quadrimotore decollò dalla pista della base aerea di Nha Trang, nel Vietnam del Sud. Sembrava un qualsiasi altro C-130 Hercules, il robusto aereo da trasporto che aveva trasportato truppe, munizioni e jeep in tutto il teatro operativo sin dagli inizi della guerra...
L'Argentina entrò in guerra nelle Falkland nell'aprile del 1982 con cinque missili Exocet lanciati dall'aria. Cinque. Quella era l'intera scorta: la Francia aveva consegnato la variante AM39 insieme a una manciata di caccia Super Étendard pochi mesi prima dell'inizio del conflitto, e...
An S7 Airlines Boeing 737-800 slid off the end of the runway at Mirny Airport in Russia’s Sakha Republic on June 30, coming to rest in mud beyond the paved surface. All 173 passengers and six crew members walked away without injury. But the incident — classified...
Share this story Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune,...
Share this story Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second...
Share this story Look at it from above and the name explains itself. The Douglas F4D was a broad, tailless delta with gently rounded wingtips — the silhouette of a manta ray gliding through water. The Navy called it the Skyray. The pilots, with magnificent...
Share this story Count the engines. Most jets have two, or four. The Martin XB-51 had three — two slung under the nose in pods, and a third buried in the tail, breathing through an intake at the base of the fin. It is one of the strangest combat aircraft the...
Share this story The Wi-Fi on your next Alaska or Hawaiian flight may now be faster than the connection in your living room. Alaska Air Group says roughly 150 of its aircraft are flying with SpaceX’s Starlink internet — and for a lot of passengers, it is...
Share this story For sixty years, one of the most welcome sounds on an American aircraft carrier was not a fighter. It was the drone of two big turboprops on approach. The C-2 Greyhound brought the mail, the spare parts, the fresh food, and the sailors heading home on...
Share this story United Flight 1513, a Boeing 737-700 inbound from Key West with 106 people on board, is on final approach to Newark Liberty on a Friday afternoon when the crew sees a small circular object — perhaps three feet across — flash past about a...
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