Aviazione militare, Notizia
There is a number that keeps the people who manage America’s drone fleet awake at night, and that number is 189. That is the minimum number of MQ-9 Reapers the Air Force says it needs to sustain its worldwide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and...
Aviazione militare, Notizia
The B-1B Lancer is getting the biggest weapons upgrade in its operational history. The U.S. Air Force’s Load Adaptable Modular (LAM) pylon program will restore six dormant external hardpoints on the bomber, boosting its total precision weapons capacity by...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 potential airline...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 Airfield, lifted its...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 metal disc,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 degrees, and a...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 afterburner. The...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 radar operator....
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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 was qualified to...
Aviazione militare, Notizia
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 knots is unusual....
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
The routine was impossible. Bob Hoover would take off in his Rockwell Shrike Commander — a twin-engine business aircraft, not an aerobatic plane — climb to altitude, and shut both engines off. Then, on nothing but momentum and gravity, he would fly a loop and an...
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