History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is physically violent...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is 21 October 1929, and 169 people are about to do something no group of human beings has ever done: leave the ground together, in a single aircraft. On the surface of Lake Constance sits the reason — a flying boat so vast that the men servicing its engines...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing airliner whose...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid and kerosene...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston age with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late 1960s, a CIA analyst sat staring at a grainy satellite photograph of the Caspian Sea and could not make the numbers work. The machine in the frame was nearly 100 metres long — longer than a Boeing 747 — yet it was clearly skimming the water,...
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