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
On 23 February 2008 at 10:30 local time, Spirit of Kansas — a Northrop Grumman B-2A stealth bomber, USAF tail number 89-0127 — taxied out for take-off on runway 06L at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. The crew, Captain Justin Grieve and Major Ryan Link, had run their...
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Beauty in aviation is a real engineering property. The aircraft that pilots, photographers, and aviation historians consistently call the most beautiful are not pretty by accident — they are pretty because every line, every fairing, every panel break is doing work....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1956, the Indian government did something the United States, Britain and France considered impossible. It hired a German aircraft designer — a man who had designed one of the deadliest fighters of the Second World War — to build India’s first indigenous...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The history books tell us that stealth was born in 1977, when Lockheed’s “Have Blue” demonstrator first flew at Groom Lake and proved that an aircraft could be designed to disappear from radar. The history books are wrong by fifteen years. The first...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in Connecticut, and...
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
If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling liquid. It is not...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The pilot puts on a Bell helmet, climbs into a cockpit narrower than a kitchen drawer, and starts two engines with scarcely more combined power than a ride-on lawnmower. The whole aircraft, fully fuelled and with him in it, weighs 170 kilograms. The wingspan is just...
English
Recent Comments