History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most aviation enthusiasts know the story of Viktor Belenko’s dramatic defection — how on September 6, 1976, a 29-year-old Soviet lieutenant flew his MiG-25 Foxbat to Hakodate Airport in Japan, delivering the West its first close look at the aircraft that had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 4 October 1957, at 22:28 Moscow time, the R-7 rocket on Pad 1 at Tyuratam — the Kazakh launch facility the world would later know as Baikonur — lifted off carrying a 58.4 cm aluminium sphere with four trailing radio antennas and a 1 watt transmitter inside. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 22 June 1941, at 03:15 Moscow time, the Luftwaffe attacked sixty-six Soviet airfields. Over 1,200 Soviet aircraft were destroyed in the first twelve hours of Operation Barbarossa, most of them parked, most of them unable to take off. The Soviet aviation propaganda...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 December 1963 a Lockheed NF-104A — an F-104 Starfighter with a rocket motor bolted to its tail — climbed away from Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert and started clawing for the edge of space. At the controls was Colonel Charles E....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of December 31, 1986, the wind off the Negev was dry and cold and the tarmac at Ben Gurion International, on the IAI factory side, was thick with people in winter coats. A small, pale, beautifully proportioned fighter jet — nose canard, single...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The cockpit of the Winnie Mae, in the summer of 1933, smelled like a hardware store on fire. Hot castor oil, cold steel, the eye-watering tang of leaded fuel sweating through the wooden wing root. There was no autopilot worth the name. There was no second pilot,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The air over the Yellow Sea, that morning, smelled of brine and avgas. It was August 13, 1945. Forty-eight hours from the surrender. Above the muggy haze, in the cockpit of a Republic P-47N called Lil Meaties Meat Chopper, a 26-year-old lieutenant from El Paso watched...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the evening of 27 September 1946, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. — son of the great Sir Geoffrey de Havilland — pushed a small, swept-wing experimental jet called the DH.108 Swallow into a high-speed dive over the Thames Estuary. He was evaluating the jet’s...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fifteen seconds. That was the gap between Lt Col William “Skate” Parks and Maj Michael “Danger” Blea and an early end to their Wild Weasel sortie over Yemen. Their strike package had already hit its targets and the jets were turning for home...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1930s were the decade Stalin made aviation a state religion. The propaganda machinery he inherited from the 1920s — Khayt’s Aviamarsh, the Dobrolyot postal posters, the early Osoaviakhim mass-membership organisation — was, by the time the first Five-Year...
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