History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1931, a cocky 21-year-old RAF pilot named Douglas Bader tried a low, showy roll in his biplane, clipped a wingtip on the grass, and crashed. Surgeons took his right leg above the knee that day, and his left below the knee months later. His flying career,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air nearly sixty...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 12 August 1944, a 29-year-old naval aviator climbed into a Liberator bomber that had been stripped of its guns and filled, wingtip to wingtip, with explosives. He did not have to be there. He had flown his tour and earned his ticket home. His name...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At the height of the Battle of Britain, with his fighter pilots being blamed for the bombers falling out of the sky, a young German ace was asked by the head of the Luftwaffe what he needed to turn things around. Adolf Galland, cigar clenched in his teeth, gave an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
When Iranian missiles struck an air base in eastern Jordan last Friday and killed American servicemen, the base was identified in every report by its name: Muwaffaq Salti. Almost nobody outside Jordan knows who that was. He was a first lieutenant in the Royal...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The A Shau valley, 10 March 1966. A Special Forces camp is being overrun by two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. The hills either side rise fifteen hundred feet and the cloud base is at eight hundred, which means any aircraft coming to help has to fly below the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Everyone knows who first broke the sound barrier: Chuck Yeager, October 1947, the orange Bell X-1, a rib strapped up with a broom handle. It is one of the great stories in aviation. But there is a second name that belongs beside it — a quiet engineer from Tennessee...
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