History & Legends, Military Aviation
By a decades-old agreement between the U.S. services, the Army isn’t really supposed to fly its own combat aeroplanes — that job belongs to the Air Force. The Grumman OV-1 Mohawk is the great exception: a stubby, triple-tailed, bug-eyed turboprop built for...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Everyone remembers the Airbus A380 as the great double-decker of the skies. Almost nobody remembers that France built one two generations earlier. In 1953, Air France put into service a broad-shouldered, four-engined airliner with two full passenger decks and a lift...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no joke. It pulled...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By late 1944, Nazi Germany was running out of almost everything an air force needs — most critically, fuel. So when Dr. Alexander Lippisch, the delta-wing pioneer behind the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet, sketched a supersonic interceptor, he gave it an engine...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the opening minutes of Octopussy (1983), Roger Moore’s James Bond escapes an exploding hangar in a jet barely bigger than he is, outruns a heat-seeking missile, then coasts up to a petrol station and deadpans: “Fill her up, please.” The joke works...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank gently into the trees...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the last winter of the war, with Allied fighters strafing German airfields almost at will, Heinkel’s engineers asked a radical question: what if a fighter needed no airfield at all? Their answer, drawn up between 1944 and March 1945, was the Lerche —...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Look closely at the tail of the Spitfire and something is wrong — gloriously, deliberately wrong. Beside the familiar red-white-blue fin flash of the Royal Air Force sits a five-pointed communist red star. This is a British fighter, in British service, flying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should have gone...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the middle of the Second World War, one of the most famous psychologists in America proposed a guidance system for bombs that used no radar, no gyroscopes, and no vacuum tubes. It used pigeons. Live ones. Riding inside the nose of the bomb.The astonishing part is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It was called the...
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