History & Legends, Military Aviation
The cake was laced with sleeping pills. The whole squadron ate it. That was Captain Alexander Zuyev’s plan, and on the night of 19 May 1989, at Mikha Tskhakaya air base in Soviet Georgia, it almost worked. The 27-year-old fighter pilot had decided he would steal...
History & Legends, Inside MiGFlug
It was 2007, somewhere in the Russian countryside near Vyazma, and Anthony Bourdain was climbing into the rear cockpit of a Soviet-era jet trainer with the same mix of excitement and barely concealed terror that he brought to every great adventure. The aircraft was an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the summer of 1941, roughly 300 American men — mostly military pilots and ground crew — quietly resigned their commissions, signed contracts with a Chinese-backed front company, and boarded ships bound for Burma. They weren’t soldiers. Not officially. They...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver was flying an SR-71 Blackbird at 78,000 feet over New Mexico at Mach 3.18. Behind him sat reconnaissance systems officer Jim Zwayer. They were evaluating procedures to reduce trim drag and improve high-Mach cruise...
Aviation World, History & Legends
One hundred years ago today — 9 May 1926 — a Fokker F.VII trimotor named Josephine Ford took off from a snow strip on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, climbed to 1,500 feet, and disappeared north into the Arctic dawn. Fifteen and a half hours later it landed back...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 May 1940, a Russian-born immigrant of fifty stood in a field in Stratford, Connecticut, climbed into a flimsy contraption made of welded steel tubing, and lifted himself one and a half metres into the air. He hovered for fifteen seconds, set the machine back...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a photograph from the Second World War that stops you in your tracks. A young man sits in what looks like an oversized tin can, mounted on a swivelling platform, aiming a machine gun at a target while the entire contraption bucks and wobbles beneath him. He...
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