Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Nel 1943, un ingegnere di 33 anni promise all'aeronautica militare statunitense un aereo da caccia a reazione in 180 giorni. Affittò un tendone da circo, lo montò accanto a una maleodorante fabbrica di plastica a Burbank, isolò un piccolo gruppo di ingegneri scelti con cura e consegnò il prototipo XP-80 in...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
Il 15 novembre 1988, un veicolo spaziale che somigliava quasi esattamente allo Space Shuttle americano si sollevò dal cosmodromo di Baikonur su una colonna di fiamme, compì due orbite intorno alla Terra e atterrò su una pista con un vento laterale di 60 km/h, senza nessuno a bordo e senza...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Non era veloce. Non era elegante. Non era adatto ai combattimenti aerei ravvicinati. E per trent'anni, quando il tempo peggiorava e il bersaglio rimaneva nascosto tra le nuvole e l'oscurità che oscuravano ogni altra cosa, la Marina degli Stati Uniti inviava il Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsonico, con il muso corto e...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell into the sea,...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes anyway. The...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
At 5:55 on the evening of Friday 4 October 1918, a small biplane with cardboard wings and a papier-mâché body lifted off a wheeled dolly running down a portable track near Dayton, Ohio. There was nobody aboard and nobody controlling it. It was supposed to fly a preset...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
The test subject was a pig. It was chosen because its nervous system is close enough to a human’s for the results to mean something, and because nobody was quite willing to find out the other way first. The pig was harnessed to a nylon line, a helium balloon...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, Howard Hughes was seventy-five minutes into the first official flight of his new reconnaissance aircraft when the right side of it stopped cooperating. Every instrument said the engine was fine. It was. What had failed was one half of...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers on the front and...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good whatsoever, because...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
At 02:19 on 21 November 1970, an American helicopter deliberately flew itself into the trees inside a North Vietnamese prison camp twenty-three miles from Hanoi. Its rotor blades chewed through forty-foot foliage and it came down hard in a courtyard roughly the size...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the evening of 14 October 1973, a C-5A Galaxy touched down at Lod airport outside Tel Aviv carrying 97 tons of 105 mm howitzer shells. Roughly a hundred miles to the south-west, the largest tank battle since Kursk was being fought, and the Israeli army was running...
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