History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late summer of 1957, in the South of France, a 36-year-old test pilot named André Turcat climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft that, by every reasonable standard of aerospace engineering, should not have flown. The Nord 1500 Griffon II had a turbojet engine....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 September 1956, in the high desert above Edwards Air Force Base, North American Aviation's chief test pilot Bob Baker pushed the throttle of an aircraft nobody outside the U.S. Air Force fighter procurement office had ever heard of into afterburner. The...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In late 1958, in the high Texas sky over Naval Air Station Dallas, Vought's chief test pilot John Konrad flew an aircraft that could outmanoeuvre, outclimb, outrun and outturn the future F-4 Phantom II. The aircraft had a single engine. It had no radar operator....
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 Korean morning was cold enough on 20 May 1951 that the ramp crews at Kimpo Air Base could see their breath inside the open cockpits as they buttoned up the F-86 Sabres of the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. The pilots, climbing into the jets, smelled the same...
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 loop, roll, fly...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the morning of 10 June 1990, British Airways Flight 5390 was climbing through 17,300 feet over the Cotswolds, on its way from Birmingham to Málaga. The aircraft was a BAC One-Eleven 528FL, the cabin crew were serving breakfast, and in the cockpit Captain Tim...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Air Defence Forces had a problem. The American B-58 Hustler had just entered service. The B-70 Valkyrie was on the drawing board. Both could cruise at Mach 2 or above, both could carry nuclear weapons, and both could outrun anything the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 18 May 1940 — exactly 86 years ago today, and a week after the German invasion of the Netherlands — a single-engined dive bomber lifted off the runway at Linköping, Sweden, and entered an aviation history that almost nobody outside Sweden remembers. The aircraft...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 18 June 1914 — eleven 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 hundred thousand astonished...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 21 September 1953, a 21-year-old Senior Lieutenant of the Korean People’s Army Air Force named No Kum-Sok climbed into his MiG-15bis at Sunan air base outside Pyongyang. Sunan was a thirty-minute drive from his home in North Korean territory;...
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