Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 4 September 1936, a turquoise-and-silver monoplane lifted off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and turned out over the Atlantic, into the dark and into the wind. At the controls, alone, was a 33-year-old woman who had never flown the ocean before....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Two months after a Soviet missile knocked Gary Powers and his U-2 out of the sky, another American aircraft was hunting the edges of the same empire. On 1 July 1960, a Boeing RB-47H was flying a lonely electronic-reconnaissance mission high over the Barents Sea, off...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The sky over Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 belonged almost entirely to the attackers. Almost. While battleships burned and most American aircraft were destroyed on the ground, a handful of pilots managed to get airborne and fight back. The most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Most fighter aces fight one enemy. Witold Urbanowicz fought two of history’s most feared air forces — the Luftwaffe over England and the Imperial Japanese over China — and beat them both. The Polish pilot did it while exiled from a homeland he would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He wore a cravat instead of a regulation tie, no rank insignia, and often a borrowed uniform. He nearly washed out of flight training. And yet Adrian “Warby” Warburton became the most decorated photo-reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air Force — the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1941, the biggest movie star to put on a uniform was not sent to make training films or sell war bonds — though the Army very much wanted him to. James Stewart, fresh off an Academy Award, wanted to fly bombers into Germany. And he had to fight his own...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Long before he invented Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory or the giant peach, Roald Dahl was lying in the Libyan desert with a fractured skull, blood in his eyes, and a burning biplane a few yards away. He was 24 years old, and he had just crash-landed a fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, the richest man in America climbed into an unproven silver aircraft and took off alone, against the advice of everyone around him. Just over an hour later, Howard Hughes was lying in the burning wreckage of a Beverly Hills living room,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1931, a cocky 21-year-old RAF pilot named Douglas Bader tried a low, showy roll in his biplane, clipped a wingtip on the grass, and crashed. Surgeons took his right leg above the knee that day, and his left below the knee months later. His flying career,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air nearly sixty...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 12 August 1944, a 29-year-old naval aviator climbed into a Liberator bomber that had been stripped of its guns and filled, wingtip to wingtip, with explosives. He did not have to be there. He had flown his tour and earned his ticket home. His name...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At the height of the Battle of Britain, with his fighter pilots being blamed for the bombers falling out of the sky, a young German ace was asked by the head of the Luftwaffe what he needed to turn things around. Adolf Galland, cigar clenched in his teeth, gave an...
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