History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late 1960s, a CIA analyst sat staring at a grainy satellite photograph of the Caspian Sea and could not make the numbers work. The machine in the frame was nearly 100 metres long — longer than a Boeing 747 — yet it was clearly skimming the water,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a flatbed trailer tilting slowly skyward in the California desert until it stands almost vertical, and clinging to it nose-up like a wasp on a windowpane, a stubby silver dart of an aircraft. There is no runway in sight. There is no landing gear worth the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a desert morning at Edwards in 1949: dust, sagebrush, and a fighter that looks like someone bolted the wings on the wrong way round. Most aircraft wings are fat where they meet the fuselage and slim to a graceful point at the tip. The Republic XF-91...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the early 1950s, the newest, fastest jets in the world kept running into an invisible wall. They would accelerate beautifully — and then, just short of the speed of sound, a surge of drag would swallow their engines’ power and stop them dead. Brand-new fighters...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It had no tail. It squatted on its undercarriage like a startled bird. It was named after a flying reptile, and in the buttoned-up world of 1930s British aviation it looked like a practical joke. The Westland-Hill Pterodactyl was none of those things. It was a deadly...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Ask anyone to name a First World War fighter ace and you’ll hear the same handful of names: the Red Baron, perhaps Billy Bishop, maybe Albert Ball. You will almost never hear the name of the deadliest pilot the Southern Hemisphere ever produced — a Melbourne boy who...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Look closely at the photograph: those are two full-size 1950s automobiles, parked comfortably underneath the helicopter. Above them sits a single rotor so vast that each of its two blades weighs as much as a small car and is wide enough to walk along. And it was spun...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Ask almost anyone which aircraft won the Battle of Britain and you will get the same answer: the Spitfire. It is one of the most beautiful machines ever built, and it has earned its legend. But it is, at best, only half the story. The aircraft that actually shot down...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In a refrigerated room hidden beneath London’s Smithfield Meat Market in 1943, behind a screen of hanging animal carcasses, a future Nobel Prize winner was busy perfecting a recipe. Not for food — for a building material. His task: prove that you could build the...
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