History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looks like a Soviet defector’s nightmare. Four giant ducted fans, each two metres in diameter, mounted on the corners of a stubby fuselage, tilting between horizontal and vertical flight. The whole machine hangs from those four fans like a hovercraft in the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the back of an early Boeing 737-200’s Pratt & Whitney JT8D engine, just behind the exhaust plug, are two big curved aluminium-honeycomb panels. In normal flight they wrap around the rear of the engine and look like the back end of the nacelle itself. On...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road. Not a real road for cars. A road-coloured runway, marked up with traffic paint, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs in Cyrillic, all of it laid down across a reserve...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If a fighter pilot ever has to pull the handle between his knees, the next quarter of a second of his life can take as much as two centimetres off his height. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. By the time the canopy clears and the seat is climbing on its rocket...
Aviation World, History & Legends
A .30 calibre bullet hits a fuel tank at 800 metres per second. The aluminium skin punctures. A jet of avgas blows out under pressure, into the slipstream, towards a hot turbocharger exhaust. The aircraft, on most tanks built before 1939, is now thirty seconds from...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Rockwell B-1B programme took to the air for the first time on 23 March 1983, in the shape of a modified B-1A testbed — and it should never have happened. Six years earlier, on 30 June 1977, President Jimmy Carter had stood before reporters in Washington and killed...
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
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...
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