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...
Il 1° agosto 1955, Tony LeVier fece decollare uno strano e nuovo aereo Lockheed dal letto di un lago prosciugato nel deserto del Nevada. L'aereo aveva ali incredibilmente lunghe e strette, simili a quelle di un aliante a motore, ed era alimentato da un singolo motore a reazione. Saliva in quota come nessun altro aereo che avesse mai pilotato...
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...
Share this story Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy...
Share this story Helicopters do something fixed-wing aircraft cannot. They land on rooftops, in jungles, on the back of a destroyer, on a forest road, on a Pacific atoll smaller than a basketball court. The price they pay is speed. A helicopter that cruises at 150...
La routine era impossibile. Bob Hoover decollava con il suo Rockwell Shrike Commander, un aereo business bimotore, non un aereo acrobatico, saliva in quota e spegneva entrambi i motori. Poi, affidandosi solo all'inerzia e alla gravità, eseguiva un looping e...
Share this story On the morning of 18 June 1914 — ten years and six months after Orville Wright lifted off Kitty Hawk — a 21-year-old American named Lawrence Burst Sperry flew a Curtiss C-2 biplane down the Seine at 50 feet above the water in front of a crowd of...
Il 13 settembre 1935, Howard Hughes salì nella cabina di pilotaggio di un elegante aereo da corsa argentato di sua progettazione e lo fece volare a 352,39 miglia orarie (565 km/h) su un percorso misurato a Santa Ana, in California, più veloce di qualsiasi aereo terrestre nella storia. Aveva 29 anni e aveva già...
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