Share this story Four twin-engined transports fly line abreast, eighty metres apart, a hundred and fifty feet above the canopy. Behind each one a white plume spreads and settles into the trees. The run takes about four and a half minutes and covers sixteen kilometres....
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
Share this story Some aeroplanes shout. The Percival Mew Gull whispered — a slip of a thing, barely twenty feet long, its wings not much wider than a family car, built almost entirely of wood and glue in a shed at Gravesend. You could have mistaken it for a toy....
Share this story Every elegant aircraft has an ungainly predecessor. Before the Hawker Siddeley Harrier hovered over Falklands task forces and Marine Corps flight decks, there was the Hawker P.1127: a stubby, bug-eyed prototype that looked less like a fighter than an...
Share this story Before the Lancaster, before the B-17, before the very idea of a four-engined heavy bomber was settled doctrine, one already existed — and it was bombing London. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, built from 1916, was a four-engined biplane with a...
Share this story On the morning of 27 August 1939, over the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small, stub-nosed monoplane lifted off with a sound no one had heard from an aeroplane before: a rising, tearing howl in place of the familiar hammer of pistons. It was...
Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
Condividi questa storia Nel 1943, qualcuno alla Saunders-Roe guardò la vasta distesa vuota e priva di aeroporti del Pacifico e ebbe un'idea gloriosamente controcorrente: e se il tuo caccia non avesse bisogno di una pista? E se atterrasse direttamente sul mare? Il risultato fu l'SR.A/1...
Condividi questa storia Immagina la riunione di presentazione. È il 1948, l'era dei jet è appena agli albori e qualcuno della Marina degli Stati Uniti si alza e dice: e se il caccia decollasse dall'oceano? Nessuna portaerei. Nessuna pista. Solo un jet supersonico ad ala delta, che fa sci d'acqua...
Share this story On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have...
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