History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Florida evening smelled of pine resin and rocket smoke. On a cracked, disused runway deep in the Eglin reservation — Wagner Field, the same strip where Doolittle’s raiders once practised short takeoffs — a four-engine Hercules sat bristling with...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Igor Sikorsky was twelve years old when he built his first helicopter — a rubber-band-powered model that lifted off from his bedroom floor in Kyiv. He spent the next fifty years making it real. Along the way, he built the world’s first four-engine aircraft, fled...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Iraqi pilots had a phrase for it. When the radar warning receiver lit up with the unmistakable signature of an AWG-9 radar, someone on the radio would scream: “F Arba Ashara! Yalla! Yalla!” — F-14! RUN! RUN! For eight years during the Iran-Iraq War,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 18 May 1991 a Soyuz TM-12 capsule lifted off from Baikonur carrying flight engineer Sergei Krikalev to Mir for a six-month mission. He was 32. He was a Soviet citizen. When Krikalev returned to Earth on 25 March 1992 — more than ten months after launch, twice his...
History & Legends, Military Aviation, News
On 10 May 1972, Major Robert “Bob” Lodge was flying an F-4D Phantom over North Vietnam when enemy fire disabled his aircraft. He had the knowledge to eject. He had the time. He chose not to. Lodge carried classified information about tactics, capabilities,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The snow was falling hard across the flat farmland of Picardy on the morning of 18 February 1944. Inside Amiens Prison — a grim, cross-shaped building surrounded by walls six metres high and a metre thick — more than 700 men sat in their cells. Among them were dozens...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1913, inside a freezing hangar at the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory in Saint Petersburg, a 24-year-old engineer named Igor Sikorsky watched as workers bolted the fourth engine onto a biplane so large it dwarfed everything else on the field. The aircraft,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On March 9, 1974, a thin, weathered man in a tattered Imperial Japanese Army uniform stepped out of the Philippine jungle on Lubang Island. He was carrying a rifle, a hand grenade, and a dagger. His uniform was patched with coconut fiber. He had been living in the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The sphere was forty-four inches across — barely wider than a dining room table. Inside it, a young man curled into the fetal position, his knees drawn to his chest, his back pressed against the curved Plexiglas wall that separated him from 25,000 feet of frozen sky....
Aviation World, History & Legends
The wind is tearing at your overalls. Below you, there is nothing — just the grey expanse of the South Atlantic, thousands of feet down, where whitecaps trace the restless surface of an ocean that has never heard of mercy. You are standing on the outer framework of...
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