History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Fighter Two airstrip on Guadalcanal and turned west over the Solomon Sea. Their mission was not to engage enemy formations or escort bombers. It was to kill one man: Admiral Isoroku...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune, without ever doing the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second crewman. This...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers — a fake...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is expensive, and then there is “costs more than Air Force One.” The VH-71 Kestrel, the helicopter that was supposed to become the next Marine One, somehow managed the second one. By the time anyone added it all up, the bill for 28 of them had passed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Late in the afternoon of 7 June 1981, eight Israeli F-16s are skimming the desert at rooftop height, fuel gauges a constant worry. Flying the last and most exposed aircraft in the formation is the youngest of them, a 27-year-old named Ilan Ramon, who has done the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky, throwing the anchored...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is a little after dawn on 15 August 1945, and a flight of Grumman F6F Hellcats is droning north over the haze of Tokyo Bay. In the cockpits are young U.S. Navy pilots of Air Group 88, launched from the carrier USS Yorktown to strike airfields near the Japanese...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In September 1944, with Allied bombers reducing German cities to rubble and the Luftwaffe haemorrhaging experienced pilots at an unsustainable rate, the Reich Air Ministry issued one of the most desperate specifications in aviation history: design a jet fighter that...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 15 April 1988, a modified Tupolev Tu-154 airliner took off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airfield with one of its three engines running on liquid hydrogen. It climbed to altitude, flew a circuit, and landed without incident. The aircraft was designated Tu-155, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the night of 11 November 1940, twenty-one Fairey Swordfish biplanes — fabric-covered, open-cockpit torpedo bombers with a top speed of 139 miles per hour — attacked the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour. When they were done, three battleships were sinking,...
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