History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the spring of 1923, in Moscow, a young Jewish composer named Yuli Khayt wrote a tune that would haunt Soviet history for the next seventy years. The lyrics, by Pavel Herman, were three verses long and told the story of the Soviet airman climbing into the future....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 9 November 1958, a British oil-exploration team flying across the eastern Libyan Sahara saw something on the sand below that should not have been there. It was an aircraft. A whole one, almost. Broken in two, but still recognisable, still upright,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The afternoon of 17 July 1969 was warm and clear above Honduras. Captain Fernando Soto’s Vought F4U-5NL Corsair, FAH-609, climbed out of the haze and into the kind of light that fighter pilots talk about for the rest of their lives. He was about to fight the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gossamer Albatross was made of carbon-fibre tubes, Mylar film, and piano wire. It weighed 31 kg. Its wingspan was 29 metres. It was powered by a single human being pedalling a bicycle mechanism connected to a pusher propeller at the rear. On 12 June 1979, Bryan...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 18 May 1991, Soyuz TM-12 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Strapped into the centre seat was a flight engineer named Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev. The launch went perfectly. The docking with the Mir space station...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The afterburners on her F-16 still burned cold-blue when First Lieutenant Heather “Lucky” Penney shoved the throttle through the gate. It was 10:42 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Her jet carried no missiles. No live ammunition — only about a hundred...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Max Conrad was 56 years old when he flew a single-engine Piper Comanche from Casablanca to Los Angeles in 1959, setting a light-aircraft world distance record — 7,668 miles nonstop — that stood until 1987. He had stripped out every non-essential item from the Comanche...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On June 3, 1973, roughly 250,000 spectators gathered at Le Bourget Airport for the Paris Air Show watched the most dramatic aviation disaster in air show history unfold in real time. A Tupolev Tu-144 — the Soviet Union’s answer to the Concorde — disintegrated in...
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