Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Before there was radar, before there were reliable instruments, before anyone had crossed the United States without landing, there was a quiet Army lieutenant named John Macready — a man who spent the early 1920s collecting aviation “firsts” the way other...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a thousand feet over Wiltshire, pulling out of a vertical dive at five times the force of gravity, Neil Williams heard a bang and felt the airframe lurch. His left wing had begun to fold up. In the next few seconds, the British aerobatic champion did something so...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a quiet man in a business suit walked up to the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. A few hours later he would step out of the back of a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a Scottish teenager was taken flying by a First World War fighter ace. As they landed, the German told the boy two things: learn to fly, and learn German. The boy did both — and grew up to fly more different aircraft than any human...
Aviation World, History & Legends
At 27,000 feet over Germany, the air was minus 60 degrees and Charlie Brown’s bomber was dying. Half its engines were gone or failing. The nose was blown open to the wind. The tail gunner was dead, other crewmen were bleeding on the freezing deck, and the young pilot...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most fighter pilots come up through the same narrow chute: flight school, a commission, a cockpit before they are old enough to rent a car without a surcharge. Kenneth Gilmore came up through a football program. Before he ever pulled Gs, he was drawing plays on a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a week in the summer of 1976, more than a hundred people sat on the floor of a disused airport terminal in the heart of Africa, four thousand kilometres from home, and waited to find out whether they would be murdered. They had been separated — Israelis and Jews...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Gate 15 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few minutes past midnight on the last day of August 1983. A Boeing 747 sits in the floodlights, doors open, while 246 passengers file aboard: businessmen bound for Taipei and Hong Kong, honeymooners, grandparents,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky, foreign parachutists...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then vanishing under the...
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