History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fifteen seconds. That was the gap between Lt Col William “Skate” Parks and Maj Michael “Danger” Blea and an early end to their Wild Weasel sortie over Yemen. Their strike package had already hit its targets and the jets were turning for home...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 February 2008 at 10:30 local time, Spirit of Kansas — a Northrop Grumman B-2A stealth bomber, USAF tail number 89-0127 — taxied out for take-off on runway 06L at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. The crew, Captain Justin Grieve and Major Ryan Link, had run their...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1930s were the decade Stalin made aviation a state religion. The propaganda machinery he inherited from the 1920s — Khayt’s Aviamarsh, the Dobrolyot postal posters, the early Osoaviakhim mass-membership organisation — was, by the time the first Five-Year...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Beauty in aviation is a real engineering property. The aircraft that pilots, photographers, and aviation historians consistently call the most beautiful are not pretty by accident — they are pretty because every line, every fairing, every panel break is doing work....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1956, the Indian government did something the United States, Britain and France considered impossible. It hired a German aircraft designer — a man who had designed one of the deadliest fighters of the Second World War — to build India’s first indigenous...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The history books tell us that stealth was born in 1977, when Lockheed’s “Have Blue” demonstrator first flew at Groom Lake and proved that an aircraft could be designed to disappear from radar. The history books are wrong by fifteen years. The first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in Connecticut, and...
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