History & Legends, Military Aviation
“Six turning, four burning” is one of the great aviation phrases. The six are 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Majors, mounted backwards along the trailing edge of the wing, swinging massive pusher propellers through air thinner than any...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Lockheed U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson at Skunk Works in 1955 to fly at 70,000 feet, photograph Soviet missile silos in colour, and never — under any circumstances — go anywhere near a body of water. The U-2 had bicycle landing gear. The U-2 had a 24-metre...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The pilots call it the White Swan. NATO calls it Blackjack. Either way, the Tupolev Tu-160 is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft ever built, and the fastest bomber in service — a 55.7-metre wingspan of variable-sweep wing, a 275-ton maximum takeoff weight, four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If you had asked a Soviet test pilot in 1940 to name the strangest aeroplane he had ever been ordered to fly, there is an excellent chance the answer would have come back as four syllables: Дэ-Бэ Эл-Ка. The Belyayev DB-LK. Two fuselages, no central cockpit,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most expensive single weapons programme of the Second World War. It cost more than the Manhattan Project. Its development consumed three billion dollars of 1944 money — call it sixty billion today — and produced an aircraft that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed one of the two aircraft at the heart of a pioneering German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal it formed on was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters simultaneously from...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Bristol Type 188 was Britain’s answer to the X-15: a research aircraft designed to probe the “thermal barrier” — the speed regime above Mach 2 where aerodynamic heating starts to damage conventional aluminium airframes. To survive it, the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If you ever wanted to know what 1928 thought a bomber should look like, the Amiot 143 is your answer. Boxy. Slab-sided. With a glasshouse gondola hanging from its belly like an afterthought welded on by a committee that had recently discovered the concept of windows....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 4 September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft ever built in Britain took off on its maiden flight from Filton, near Bristol. It had a wingspan of 70 metres — longer than a Boeing 747’s. Eight engines, buried in the wings in pairs, drove four sets of...
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