Share this story By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a...
Share this story In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It could sustain Mach 2 — a speed contemporary fighters could reach only in short dashes. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable...
Share this story It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let...
Share this story Bill Allen, the buttoned-down chief executive of Boeing in 1955, was on a boat. So were the executives of every major airline in the United States — gathered on Lake Washington outside Seattle for the annual Gold Cup hydroplane race. Bill Allen had...
Florence Leontine Lowe crebbe in una tenuta di Pasadena così sfarzosa da impiegare 26 domestici. Sposò un pastore a 18 anni, ebbe un figlio e poi, nel 1928, si travestì da uomo e fuggì in Messico su una nave carica di banane con il nome di "Pancho". Aveva 26 anni e...
Share this story Before the rockets. Before the electric cars became mainstream. Before Mars, before the tunnels, before the social media platform — there was a young South African entrepreneur in the Nevada desert, strapped into the cockpit of a Cold War-era jet,...
Share this story On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And...
Atterrò in un campo agricolo fuori Londonderry, nell'Irlanda del Nord, il 21 maggio 1932, e il contadino che le corse incontro attraverso l'erba le chiese se avesse fatto molta strada. "Dall'America", rispose lei. Aveva volato per 14 ore e 56 minuti, in un...
Share this story The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit held only rudimentary instruments — an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator — and the controls to fire three solid-fuel rocket motors....
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
Share this story On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath a Boeing B-50...
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
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