History & Legends, Military Aviation
Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees something his...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power, and lumbered...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks above the green...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that fit: it was, he...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Ask which is better, the MiG-29 or the Su-30, and you have already misunderstood the question. They were never meant to compete. They are the two halves of a single idea — the Soviet Union’s deliberate decision to build one small fighter and one big one, each...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The most important document in the history of stealth aircraft was not written in California or at a secret desert airfield. It was written in Moscow, in Russian, by a Soviet physicist — and the Soviet Union let it go abroad because it decided the work was of no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter for four armed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined fighter the Third...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Look at almost any jet airliner and the engines are in one of two places: slung under the wings, or bolted to the tail. Now look at the VFW-614. Its two engines sit on pylons on top of the wings — a layout almost no other airliner in history has ever used. It was West...
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