History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of Friday, 26 October 2001, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, stepped up to a podium in Washington. Three thousand kilometres away, Boeing chairman Phil Condit and his Joint Strike Fighter boss, Frank Statkus,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was a Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, 29 February 2008 — a leap day, fittingly, for a decision almost nobody saw coming. Air Force officials stepped before the press to name the winner of the KC-X tanker programme, 179 aircraft and roughly 35 billion...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The desert air was still cool at Edwards Air Force Base on the morning of 27 August 1990 when Northrop chief test pilot Paul Metz taxied out in a machine that looked like nothing else on Earth. Charcoal grey, diamond-winged, its two tails canted outward like the fins...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 25 January 1995, on the island of Andøya in Arctic Norway, a team of Norwegian and American scientists watched a four-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket climb away from its launcher and curve north-east over the sea towards Svalbard. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fifteen minutes past midnight, 26 September 1983. In a command bunker called Serpukhov-15, south-west of Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is settled into the commander’s chair for a night shift he was not originally scheduled to work. In front of him:...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the late afternoon of Saturday, 27 October 1962, the men of Soviet submarine B-59 had very little left to breathe. The boat had been at sea for almost four weeks, hiding from the US Navy in the warm water north of Cuba, and her batteries were nearly flat. With the...
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