History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful, fighting their...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence over the water has...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s most important...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is flying a flimsy Etrich...
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...
Recent Comments