History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 September 1956, in the high desert above Edwards Air Force Base, North American Aviation's chief test pilot Bob Baker pushed the throttle of an aircraft nobody outside the U.S. Air Force fighter procurement office had ever heard of into afterburner. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In late 1958, in the high Texas sky over Naval Air Station Dallas, Vought's chief test pilot John Konrad flew an aircraft that could outmanoeuvre, outclimb, outrun and outturn the future F-4 Phantom II. The aircraft had a single engine. It had no radar operator....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy was qualified to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The routine was impossible. Bob Hoover would take off in his Rockwell Shrike Commander — a twin-engine business aircraft, not an aerobatic plane — climb to altitude, and shut both engines off. Then, on nothing but momentum and gravity, he would fly a loop and an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 18 June 1914 — ten years and six months after Orville Wright lifted off Kitty Hawk — a 21-year-old American named Lawrence Burst Sperry flew a Curtiss C-2 biplane down the Seine at 50 feet above the water in front of a crowd of astonished Parisians....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 September 1935, Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of a sleek silver racer of his own design and flew it at 352.39 mph across a measured course in Santa Ana, California — faster than any landplane in history had ever flown. He was 29 years old, had already...
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