Kaman K-MAX, Synchropter That Outlifts Itself
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...
Aermacchi MB-326, Italy’s Globe-Trotting Jet Trainer
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...
Northrop’s Magnesium Flying Wing That Never Fought
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...
MiG-19 Farmer: Soviet Supersonic First
On 3 July 1955, forty-eight identical swept-wing jets thundered over Tushino airfield outside Moscow in a single roaring formation. Western observers at the airshow did the arithmetic and felt a chill: the Soviet Union had just fielded its first supersonic fighter in...
The Nazi Fighter Designed to Burn Coal
By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave it an engine...
The Nazi Fighter That Flew Inside a Ring
In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the Lerche —...
The Jet With Giant Fans Hidden in Its Wings
Most vertical-takeoff jets of the 1960s did the obvious thing: point the engine nozzles down and blast the aircraft off the ground. Ryan’s XV-5 Vertifan did something far stranger. It hid two enormous fans inside its wings, spun them with its own jet exhaust,...
The Last Aircraft Curtiss-Wright Ever Built
The name Curtiss-Wright carried a century of aviation in it — the fusion of Glenn Curtiss’s company with the firm founded by the Wright brothers themselves. For decades it built engines, propellers and aircraft that helped win two world wars. And then, in...
The Six-Jet Bomber That Shaped Every Airliner
Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft ever built. When...
The Bomber So Loud Submarines Can Hear It
There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is the sound of the...
Recent Comments