History & Legends, Military Aviation
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 1 November 1950, UN pilots over North Korea encountered something they had not expected: a swept-wing jet fighter faster, more agile, and better armed than anything in their inventory. The MiG-15 appeared above the Yalu River — the border between North Korea and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He had been awake for 23 hours before he even took off. Charles Lindbergh spent the night of 19 May 1927 in a hotel near Roosevelt Field, Long Island, unable to sleep, while rain hammered the airfield and weather reports from the Atlantic were ambiguous at best. At...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every military pilot flying today sits on a device that can blast them out of a crippled aircraft in a fraction of a second. From the moment of handle pull to full parachute deployment takes less than two seconds. The seat fires its occupant at up to 20g and 600 mph...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Louis Blériot was flying on a broken ankle. His monoplane — a fragile structure of spruce, ash, and rubberised canvas — had a 25-horsepower engine that overheated on long runs. He had no compass. No radio. No life jacket. As he climbed to 250 feet over the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1924, flying around the world meant crossing the Pacific Ocean in open biplanes, with engines that had to be rebuilt every few thousand miles, relying on supply ships pre-positioned across the widest ocean on Earth by a US Navy that had deployed its vessels months...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
They were bicycle mechanics. No formal engineering degrees, no government funding, no team of PhDs. Just Wilbur and Orville Wright, a shed in Dayton, Ohio, and an obsession that bordered on madness. By the time they arrived at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The US Army Air Forces didn’t want them. The military establishment was convinced, and had “proved” through pseudo-scientific studies, that Black men lacked the intelligence, the nerve, and the coordination to fly combat aircraft. When political...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 18 April 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, sixteen B-25 Mitchell medium bombers launched from the deck of USS Hornet — something that had never been done before and would never be attempted again — and flew 1,000 miles to bomb Tokyo. The military damage they...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Quick FactsNationalityPakistani 🇵🇰Aerial Victories9 (5 in under 60 seconds — world record sortie)Aircraft FlownF-86 SabreWars1965 Indo-Pakistani WarBorn / Died6 Jul 1935 – 18 Mar 2013 (age 77)UnitNo. 11 Squadron PAF “Arrows” Mohammad Mahmood Alam 1965 —...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1936, American Airlines president C.R. Smith made an audacious request to Donald Douglas: build an airliner that could carry passengers across America in 16 hours and make money doing it. The result was the Douglas DC-3 — an aircraft so well-designed that it...
English
Recent Comments