Share this story For three decades during the Cold War, Britain’s nuclear deterrent rested on the wings of three extraordinary aircraft: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan, and the Handley Page Victor. Known collectively as the V-bombers, they were designed to...
Share this story The Handley Page Victor was the last and most advanced of Britain’s three V-bombers — and the one with the longest career. Designed to carry nuclear weapons to Moscow at high altitude, it outlived its original mission by decades, reinventing...
Share this story For more than half a century, the Boeing 747 was the largest and most recognisable commercial aircraft on Earth. From its first flight in 1969 to its final delivery in January 2023, the “Queen of the Skies” carried billions of passengers,...
Share this story Twenty Sea Harriers sailed south with the Royal Navy task force in April 1982. None of them should have survived. The Argentine Air Force outnumbered them five to one, flew faster jets, and operated from concrete runways while the British pilots...
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...
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