History & Legends, Military Aviation
He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest fighter pilots the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball of fire —...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Everyone remembers Charles Lindbergh. Almost nobody remembers the three men who, a year later, flew the Atlantic the hard way — against the wind, from Europe to America — and nearly died doing it. Their aircraft was called the Bremen, and their forgotten...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In August 1944, a young Minnesotan named Ken Dahlberg shot down three German aircraft in a single swirling dogfight, took a bullet through his oil system, and bailed out into the clouds over occupied France. Sheltered by the Resistance and — by one account...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 17 May 1935, the man who would later write The Little Prince climbed aboard the largest aircraft on Earth. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Moscow reporting for a French newspaper, was the only foreigner allowed onto the Tupolev ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky” —...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Take a V-1 flying bomb — the pilotless cruise missile that terrorised London in 1944 — and cut a small hole in the fuselage just ahead of the engine. Fit a plywood seat, a single control column, and a handful of basic instruments. Now put a young man...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By 1942 Eddie Rickenbacker had already cheated death more times than most men attempt it. He was America’s “Ace of Aces” from the First World War, a former Indianapolis 500 racer, and the hard-driving boss of Eastern Air Lines. He was in his early...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He was twenty-one, a copper miner’s son from Phoenix with a boxer’s swagger and a habit of ignoring orders. In the last September of the First World War, Second Lieutenant Frank Luke Jr. turned himself into the most feared balloon-hunter in the skies over...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 21 September 1953, a flight line at Kimpo Air Base watched a swept-wing jet swing onto the approach and took it for one of their own F-86 Sabres. It wasn’t. It was a Soviet-built MiG-15, still wearing North Korean red stars, flown by a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was the most meticulously rehearsed rescue mission in modern US military history — and it saved nobody. In the pre-dawn dark of 21 November 1970, a joint Army–Air Force strike force punched 23 miles into North Vietnam, straight past Hanoi’s...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the spring of 1928 the Pacific Ocean was still, in aviation terms, a blank. No one had ever flown an aircraft across it. The distances were monstrous, the weather unknowable, and the navigation — over thousands of miles of empty water with no landmarks — bordered...
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