Aviation World, History & Legends
It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking toward a black ocean...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing airliner whose...
Aviation World, History & Legends
At 11,000 feet over the wooded hills north of New York City, on a grey December afternoon, two airliners that were never supposed to meet found themselves on a converging path. Within seconds the tip of a Boeing 707’s left wing sliced through the triple tail of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid and kerosene...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston age with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The blizzard came in off the Sea of Japan in sheets, and the flight deck of the USS Oriskany pitched in the grey November swell. It was 18 November 1952, and Lieutenant Royce Williams climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther for his second mission of the...
Recent Comments