It looks like a paper dart that a child drew and an engineer took seriously. A long needle nose, a huge triangular wing, spindly stalk-like landing gear, and a single small jet perched at the base of the fin. The Handley Page HP.115 was one of the strangest and most...
Watch a K-MAX work a mountainside and something looks wrong. Two rotor masts lean apart in a shallow V, their blades slicing through each other’s arc, and yet nothing collides. There is no tail rotor at all. This is the Kaman K-MAX, a synchropter built for one...
A wall of orange climbs a Greek hillside, and out of the smoke drops a white-and-blue jet skimming the sea. It touches the waves, drinks twelve tonnes of water in fourteen seconds, hauls itself back into the sky and unloads the lot onto the flames. This is the Beriev...
In the mid-1950s, a defeated and rebuilding Italy could not afford to chase supersonic fighters. So one Macchi engineer, Ermanno Bazzocchi, aimed lower and smarter. His compact single-engine trainer would go on to fly in the colours of more than ten air forces and be...
Every pilot who trained on it remembers the sound before the shape. Long before you saw the stubby little jet taxi out, you heard it: a shriek so piercing it seemed to drill straight through your skull. Ground crews had a name for the Cessna T-37 that said it all....
On the morning of 5 June 1967, a handful of little French-built trainers lifted off from Israeli airfields on what looked like a routine sortie. Within hours they were diving on armour in the Sinai. The Fouga Magister, a jet designed to teach teenagers to fly, had...
Picture a fat-bodied transport sitting on a Montreal ramp in 1965, engines spun up, and then the whole wing hinging skyward until the propellers point at the clouds. The aircraft rises straight up, hangs in the air, and then the wing tilts forward again until it is...
Before the UH-60 wore the name, there was another Blackhawk, and it was a snarling gunship. The Sikorsky S-67 first flew on 20 August 1970, a sleek, low-slung attack helicopter built entirely on Sikorsky’s own money in a frantic nine-month sprint. Be clear from...
At an airshow in December 1967, the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne did something helicopters were not supposed to do. It bowed. Landing on its two forward wheels, it dipped its nose to the crowd, then gently set its tail down and taxied away. The trick was the pusher...
On a carrier deck in the northern autumn of 1991, a fighter unlike anything in the West rose straight up on pillars of flame, rotated its tail nozzle back to level, and accelerated away past the speed of sound. This was the Yakovlev Yak-141, NATO codename Freestyle:...
Roll it out onto the sun-bleached hardpan at Muroc in 1943 and the Northrop XP-56 looked less like a fighter than a dark, headless projectile. There was almost no tail, no nose propeller, and a fat belly fin slicing the desert air. Jack Northrop called it the Black...
When the Supermarine Scimitar first crashed onto a carrier deck in 1958, it arrived as the biggest, heaviest and most powerful aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had ever tried to operate from a ship. Twin Rolls-Royce Avons gave it such brutal thrust that a pilot could stand...
Recent Comments