History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all but a handful had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with the most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name stuck for the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy aircraft than any...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down here. Climb, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By 1952 the jet age had well and truly arrived. Swept-wing MiGs and Sabres were tearing across the skies of Korea at close to the speed of sound, and the propeller-driven fighter looked like a museum piece. Nobody told the Hawker Sea Fury. On a August morning over...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest fighter pilots the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball of fire —...
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