Aviation World, History & Legends
In the autumn of 1932, a small, barrel-chested aeroplane painted red and white sat on a Cleveland airfield looking less like an aircraft than a cartoon of one. It was almost all engine — a giant radial nose bolted to a stubby fuselage, with the cockpit shoved so far...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and again, while the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
Aviation World, History & Legends
From the moment humans first left the ground, a certain kind of pilot has asked a dangerous question: what happens if I try this? The answers fill the wildest chapter of aviation history — a century of loops, rolls, dives and impossible threading of gaps, flown by men...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somewhere over central France in the late 1950s, test pilot André Turcat pushes a strange delta-winged aircraft past the speed where a normal jet engine begins to gasp for air. And that is when the Nord Griffon comes alive. Behind him, a ramjet the size of a small...
Aviation World, History & Legends
There is a sound a Lockheed P-38 Lightning makes that no other warbird can — two Allison V-12s, turbo-supercharged, humming in eerie harmony as the twin-boom fighter slides overhead. For most enthusiasts, hearing it once in a lifetime is a gift. This July at Oshkosh,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Tomorrow, as America’s 250th birthday flyovers thunder across the country, watch for the moment the crowd goes quiet. Four jets approach in perfect formation — and then one pulls up, streaming away from the others, climbing alone toward the vertical until...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On April Fools’ Day 2001, seventy miles off China’s Hainan Island, a Chinese fighter pilot misjudged his third close pass at an American spy plane by a few feet — and nearly started a war. The collision sheared his J-8 interceptor in half, tore the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 7 August 1942, over a island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in a fighter with no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 250 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic exile was about to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Just after eight on the morning of 29 April 1975, American Radio Service in Saigon interrupted its programming to announce that the temperature was “105 degrees and rising.” Then it played White Christmas. In a city where it never snows, in the last April...
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