History & Legends, Military Aviation
Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy was qualified to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The routine was impossible. Bob Hoover would take off in his Rockwell Shrike Commander — a twin-engine business aircraft, not an aerobatic plane — climb to altitude, and shut both engines off. Then, on nothing but momentum and gravity, he would fly a loop and an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 18 June 1914 — ten years and six months after Orville Wright lifted off Kitty Hawk — a 21-year-old American named Lawrence Burst Sperry flew a Curtiss C-2 biplane down the Seine at 50 feet above the water in front of a crowd of astonished Parisians....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 September 1935, Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of a sleek silver racer of his own design and flew it at 352.39 mph across a measured course in Santa Ana, California — faster than any landplane in history had ever flown. He was 29 years old, had already...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The admirals were convinced it was impossible. You simply could not sink a battleship from the air. Battleships were armoured fortresses, built to absorb punishment from naval guns. Bombs dropped from altitude, they argued, would never hit anything. General Billy...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Before Glenn Curtiss had ever sat in an aeroplane, he was already the fastest man in the world. On 23 January 1907, he rode a V8-engined motorcycle of his own construction at 136.3 mph across a measured mile in Ormond Beach, Florida. It was the fastest a human being...
Aviation World, History & Legends
At three o’clock on a September morning in 1956, the residents of St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights were asleep — blissfully unaware that a single-engine Cessna was descending toward their street from the darkness above the Hudson River. The pilot had no...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 26 May 1941, fifteen fabric-covered biplanes lumbered off the pitching deck of HMS Ark Royal into a North Atlantic gale. Their target was the most powerful warship in the world: the German battleship Bismarck, a 50,000-ton behemoth that had just...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture, if you will, a jet fighter the size of a compact car. A fighter with no landing gear — because it was never supposed to land. A fighter designed to be stored in a bomb bay, dropped into combat, and then retrieved by flying back up to a moving bomber and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
James Harold Doolittle flew two flights that changed the world — and they could scarcely have been more different. The first was on 24 September 1929, at Mitchel Field, Long Island, when he climbed into a Consolidated NY-2 biplane with a fabric hood pulled over the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the morning of January 2, 1967, a formation of aircraft appeared on North Vietnamese radar screens approaching Hanoi from the west. To the radar operators at Phuc Yen and Gia Lam airfields, the electronic signatures looked familiar: F-105 Thunderchiefs, the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of February 20, 1959, workers arrived at Avro Canada’s sprawling plant in Malton, Ontario, and were handed slips of paper that said one thing: you are dismissed. By lunchtime, 14,000 people were out of work. By the following weeks, engineers who...
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