Aviation World, History & Legends
It is January 1921, and a crowd has gathered on the shore of Lago Maggiore near Sesto Calende. They are staring at a houseboat. Or a cathedral. Or perhaps a floating lumber yard that has sprouted wings — nine of them — and eight bellowing American engines. The thing...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The snow was falling hard across the flat farmland of Picardy on the morning of 18 February 1944. Inside Amiens Prison — a grim, cross-shaped building surrounded by walls six metres high and a metre thick — more than 700 men sat in their cells. Among them were dozens...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1913, inside a freezing hangar at the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory in Saint Petersburg, a 24-year-old engineer named Igor Sikorsky watched as workers bolted the fourth engine onto a biplane so large it dwarfed everything else on the field. The aircraft,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On August 22, 1972, at the Zhukovsky flight test center outside Moscow, a colossal aircraft unlike anything the Western world had ever seen rolled onto the runway. Its drooping nose — eerily similar to the Concorde’s — was raised for takeoff...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The deck crew on USS Hancock froze as the Cutlass approached from astern, its twin vertical fins silhouetted against a Pacific sunset in the summer of 1955. Lieutenant Commander Jay Alkire lined up his approach, but the underpowered Westinghouse engines couldn’t...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The glue was still wet when test pilot Gotthold Peter strapped himself into the cockpit on December 10, 1944. The Heinkel He 162 had made its maiden flight just four days earlier — ninety days after the first design drawings had been submitted — and the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was the most beautiful failure in the history of experimental aviation. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto — a needle-nosed, razor-winged aircraft that looked like it had been designed to stab a hole through the sound barrier — first flew on October 20, 1952, from Edwards...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Two hours into a surveillance mission over Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Kevin Henry felt it begin. A tingling in his joints. A creeping confusion behind his eyes. Then the nausea hit — sudden, violent, disorienting. At 70,000 feet in a Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady, the nitrogen...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On March 9, 1974, a thin, weathered man in a tattered Imperial Japanese Army uniform stepped out of the Philippine jungle on Lubang Island. He was carrying a rifle, a hand grenade, and a dagger. His uniform was patched with coconut fiber. He had been living in the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The sphere was forty-four inches across — barely wider than a dining room table. Inside it, a young man curled into the fetal position, his knees drawn to his chest, his back pressed against the curved Plexiglas wall that separated him from 25,000 feet of frozen sky....
Aviation World, History & Legends
The wind is tearing at your overalls. Below you, there is nothing — just the grey expanse of the South Atlantic, thousands of feet down, where whitecaps trace the restless surface of an ocean that has never heard of mercy. You are standing on the outer framework of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Junkers Ju 52 — affectionately known as Tante Ju (Auntie Ju) — is one of the most recognizable aircraft of World War II. Its corrugated duralumin skin, three engines, and fixed landing gear made it the workhorse of the Luftwaffe’s transport fleet. But there...
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