History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 22 May 1991, F-104G serial 26+40 lifted off from Ingolstadt-Manching in Bavaria for the final operational flight of any West German F-104 Starfighter. The pilot flew a brief profile over the Alps. He returned to Manching. The aircraft was shut down. The chocks went...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation, News
On May 17, 2026, two U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets collided midair during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. The collision happened in front of thousands of spectators. Both aircraft were destroyed. All four crew...
History & Legends, Military Aviation, News
On May 14, 2026, at Villa Reynolds Air Base in San Luis province, the Argentine Air Force said goodbye to the last of its A-4AR Fightinghawks. It was not just a retirement ceremony. It was the closing of a chapter that stretches back sixty years — six decades of a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for potential airline...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On August 3, 1945, a Japanese test pilot named Masayoshi Tsuruno climbed into the strangest fighter prototype Japan had ever built and pushed the throttle forward. The aircraft trundled along the runway at Kyūshū Aircraft Company’s Mushiroda Airfield, lifted its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If you ever stand in front of the gigantic Cold War hangar at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, you will see, parked between an XB-70 Valkyrie and a YF-12, something that looks like it landed there yesterday — a domed metal disc,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1960, in a hangar at the Bell Aircraft plant in Buffalo, New York, the United States Air Force unveiled the wildest single-seat fighter ever proposed by an American manufacturer. It had a needle-nosed fuselage, two wing-tip nacelles that could swivel through 100...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On October 1, 1949, just past three in the afternoon, the new People’s Republic of China formally announced itself to the world. Mao Zedong stood on the rostrum at Tiananmen Gate, read the proclamation, and watched the first National Day parade march past. Then...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It happened in the dark, somewhere over Tehran’s northern suburbs, on the night of March 4, 2026. An Iranian Yakovlev Yak-130 — a Russian-built trainer-light-attack jet, painted in IRIAF camouflage — climbed out of Mehrabad as Israeli fighters worked the western...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
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