History & Legends, Military Aviation
If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling liquid. It is not...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The pilot puts on a Bell helmet, climbs into a cockpit narrower than a kitchen drawer, and starts two engines with scarcely more combined power than a ride-on lawnmower. The whole aircraft, fully fuelled and with him in it, weighs 170 kilograms. The wingspan is just...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looks like a Soviet defector’s nightmare. Four giant ducted fans, each two metres in diameter, mounted on the corners of a stubby fuselage, tilting between horizontal and vertical flight. The whole machine hangs from those four fans like a hovercraft in the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the back of an early Boeing 737-200’s Pratt & Whitney JT8D engine, just behind the exhaust plug, are two big curved aluminium-honeycomb panels. In normal flight they wrap around the rear of the engine and look like the back end of the nacelle itself. On...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road. Not a real road for cars. A road-coloured runway, marked up with traffic paint, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs in Cyrillic, all of it laid down across a reserve...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If a fighter pilot ever has to pull the handle between his knees, the next quarter of a second of his life can take as much as two centimetres off his height. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. By the time the canopy clears and the seat is climbing on its rocket...
Aviation World, History & Legends
A .30 calibre bullet hits a fuel tank at 800 metres per second. The aluminium skin punctures. A jet of avgas blows out under pressure, into the slipstream, towards a hot turbocharger exhaust. The aircraft, on most tanks built before 1939, is now thirty seconds from...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 April 1963, at the Entwicklungsring Süd flight-test centre in Manching, Bavaria, a small twin-tailed jet with six engines lifted itself off the tarmac vertically. There was no nozzle deflection like a Harrier. There were no rotors like a helicopter. The four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The cargo on the back of the aircraft is roughly twice as wide as the aircraft itself. The cargo also weighs 50 tonnes. The cargo is a Soviet Buran space shuttle missing its vertical stabiliser, strapped to the spine of a strategic bomber from which the original tail...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Rockwell B-1B programme took to the air for the first time on 23 March 1983, in the shape of a modified B-1A testbed — and it should never have happened. Six years earlier, on 30 June 1977, President Jimmy Carter had stood before reporters in Washington and killed...
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