History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath a Boeing B-50 Superfortress mothership,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Take a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress. Remove the nose. Bolt a jet engine where the bombardier used to sit. Now fly it. That is not a thought experiment. From 1947 to 1966, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation did exactly that — operating a modified B-17G as an airborne...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
You know what a B-17 looks like. Four radial engines. The towering tail fin. Glass nose. Heavy-bomber Americana, stamped onto a thousand black-and-white photographs of the daylight raids over Germany. Now picture one with a fifth engine bolted to its nose — a giant...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Three were built. Three flew. One crashed. Two went into storage. None ever entered service. The Lockheed YF-12 is one of those aircraft that should have rewritten the book on continental air defence and instead became a footnote — overshadowed by the SR-71 Blackbird...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 January 1964, a B-52H Stratofortress flown by a Boeing test crew on a structural test flight near East Spanish Peak in southern Colorado when it flew into the worst clear-air turbulence anyone aboard had ever experienced. There was no warning, no cloud cover, no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was the fastest fighter at low level in the Royal Air Force inventory, faster than the Spitfire below 15,000 feet. It carried four 20mm cannons in its nose — twice the firepower of any other British fighter. It first flew in October 1938 and entered service in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts the twin-section Allison turboprop driving its 16-foot contra-rotating...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Glue two P-51 Mustangs together along the wing. Share a tailplane between them. Put the radio operator’s seat in the right fuselage. Tell the pilot in the left fuselage to fly the aircraft. The result is the F-82 Twin Mustang — the longest-range piston fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Of all the strange aircraft the United States built during the Second World War — and there were many — none was stranger, on paper or in person, than the Northrop XP-79. The XP-79 has gone down in history as a manned missile. Its mission, so the famous story goes,...
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