Inside MiGFlug, Military Aviation
“I feel the need — the need for speed.” “Talk to me, Goose.” Four decades after Top Gun first lit up the screen, those lines still make grown adults want to sprint to the nearest aircraft carrier. And almost all of them, sooner or later,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov, has reportedly...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle swells,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 20 June 1951, over the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler did something no pilot had ever done. As his stubby little research jet, the Bell X-5, climbed away from the desert floor, he reached for a control and the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the morning of 28 June 1939, twenty-two extraordinarily lucky people walked down a pier at Port Washington on Long Island and climbed aboard what looked like an ocean liner with wings. Captain R.O.D. Sullivan ran up the four big engines, and the Boeing 314 flying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the middle of the night somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, and a four-engine turboprop is flying low and slow above the black water. Inside, a Navy flight officer hunches over a screen, watching a pattern of floating microphones he has just seeded across the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
It is just before dawn on 17 April 1944, and a sleek, triple-tailed airliner is rolling down the runway at Lockheed’s Burbank field. In the left seat, hands on the controls, sits one of the most famous men in America: Howard Hughes — aviator, tycoon, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the brakes, and the little...
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