History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 February 2008 at 10:30 local time, Spirit of Kansas — a Northrop Grumman B-2A stealth bomber, USAF tail number 89-0127 — taxied out for take-off on runway 06L at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. The crew, Captain Justin Grieve and Major Ryan Link, had run their...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1956, the Indian government did something the United States, Britain and France considered impossible. It hired a German aircraft designer — a man who had designed one of the deadliest fighters of the Second World War — to build India’s first indigenous...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The history books tell us that stealth was born in 1977, when Lockheed’s “Have Blue” demonstrator first flew at Groom Lake and proved that an aircraft could be designed to disappear from radar. The history books are wrong by fifteen years. The first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 April 1963, at the Entwicklungsring Süd flight-test centre in Manching, Bavaria, a small twin-tailed jet with six engines lifted itself off the tarmac vertically. There was no nozzle deflection like a Harrier. There were no rotors like a helicopter. The four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The pilots call it the White Swan. NATO calls it Blackjack. Either way, the Tupolev Tu-160 is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft ever built, and the fastest bomber in service — a 55.7-metre wingspan of variable-sweep wing, a 275-ton maximum takeoff weight, four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Bristol Type 188 was Britain’s answer to the X-15: a research aircraft designed to probe the “thermal barrier” — the speed regime above Mach 2 where aerodynamic heating starts to damage conventional aluminium airframes. To survive it, the...
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