Aviation World, History & Legends
There is a photograph, taken in 1965, that tells the story of the twentieth century in a single frame. Wernher von Braun sits in his office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Behind him, arranged on a shelf like trophies, stand models...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1980s were the decade Soviet aviation propaganda kept its volume but lost its conviction. The propaganda apparatus that had spent sixty years building the Aviamarsh, the cosmonaut cult, and the Salyut routine kept producing the same posters, the same stamps and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The rotor wash tore across the darkened compound like a hurricane at 2:18 in the morning. Tracer rounds carved neon arcs through the North Vietnamese night as a Sikorsky HH-3E Jolly Green Giant deliberately crash-landed inside the walls of Son Tay prison camp, its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1970s were the decade Soviet aviation propaganda had to learn to live with second place. On 20 July 1969 — eighteen months before the new decade began — Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and every Soviet propaganda narrative built around the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gulf of Tonkin was a flat sheet of hammered silver under the late-June haze, and the little twin-boomed Bronco came down toward it trailing fire and smoke. Inside the front cockpit, Air Force Captain Steven L. Bennett had a parachute that worked perfectly, an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of October 11, 1989 began like any other in the Jezreel Valley. Beside a dusty crop-dusting strip near Megiddo, a worker named Ya’acov Aboudi was going about his business when the air split open with the shriek of a jet engine and a Soviet fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 12 April 1961, at 06:07 GMT, a Vostok-K rocket lifted off from Baikonur carrying Senior Lieutenant Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force into a 169-by-327 kilometre orbit around the Earth. The flight lasted 108 minutes. Gagarin’s last word before...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On November 1, 1952, the world’s first hydrogen bomb vaporized the island of Elugelab in the Marshall Islands. The explosion — designated Ivy Mike — produced a fireball three miles wide and a mushroom cloud that punched into the stratosphere. And while most sane...
English
Recent Comments