Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks, and haul them...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By any measure of raw combat output, Hans-Ulrich Rudel is one of the most extraordinary military pilots who ever lived. He flew 2,530 combat missions, was shot down some thirty times, lost a leg and kept fighting, and was decorated more than any other German...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1941, a German engineer handed the Reich Air Ministry a several-hundred-page report describing a way to bomb New York from the edge of space. The weapon would be launched off a two-mile rail, rocket to the fringe of the atmosphere at some 24 times the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 9 July 1961, a huge four-engined jet thundered over the Tushino airfield near Moscow, flanked by two MiG-21s. Western observers craned their necks and reached for their notebooks. Here, it seemed, was proof that the Soviet Union had built a supersonic...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one aboard and no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet climbed at more than 3,600 metres per minute — so fast that Allied bomber crews, seeing it for the first time in the summer of 1944, could scarcely track it. In a single breathtaking arc it could reach the bombers, fire, and be...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 2005 on 17 May 1987, the guided missile frigate USS Stark was told that an Iraqi aircraft had left the mainland and was heading south down the Persian Gulf. This was not alarming. Iraqi aircraft did this most nights, hunting tankers carrying Iranian oil, and they...
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