Aviation World, History & Legends
The photograph looks fake. A short-fuselage Soviet-era twin-engine airliner — a Tupolev Tu-134, the workhorse of Aeroflot domestic routes for thirty years — is hanging in midair beneath a single helicopter. The Tu-134 weighs about 28 tonnes empty. It is sixty feet...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine the worst-case scenario from the Pentagon perspective in 1957: the Soviet Union launches a surprise nuclear strike against NATO. The first warheads land on every U.S. and allied air base in Western Europe within the first ten minutes. Every runway is cratered....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The most ambitious naval aviation concept the United States ever fielded was not the nuclear-powered supercarrier. It was a 785-foot helium airship with an interior hangar bay full of biplane fighters that could be launched and recovered in flight. There were two of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 19 January 1991, three days into Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. Air Force launched the largest F-16 strike in history. Seventy-two Vipers, supported by F-15 escorts, F-4G Wild Weasels, EF-111 Ravens, and KC-135 tankers, headed for downtown Baghdad. The mission...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The SR-71 Blackbird is the most untouchable aircraft ever built. In 32 years of operational service it was fired at by surface-to-air missiles more than 4,000 times — and not a single one ever hit. The recipe was simple: cruise at Mach 3.2 at 85,000 feet and outrun...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1973, a Polish state-owned aircraft factory rolled out one of the strangest production aircraft ever built. Two wings, stacked biplane-style. A 14,500-pound-thrust jet engine on the back. Two enormous pesticide tanks slung between the wings like a chemical...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1976, Boeing rolled a strange-looking jet out of its Renton plant. Two turbofans mounted high above the wings — not under them, where every cargo aircraft in history had put its engines. Stubby, square fuselage. T-tail. A wing that looked too small for the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is one of those records that does not seem possible when you read it on paper. On 22 and 23 May 1958, a U.S. Marine Corps test pilot named Edward N. LeFaivre took off five times from Naval Air Station Point Mugu, California, climbed each time as fast as his Douglas...
English
Recent Comments