History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within a few minutes,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
At 27,000 feet over Germany, the air was minus 60 degrees and Charlie Brown’s bomber was dying. Half its engines were gone or failing. The nose was blown open to the wind. The tail gunner was dead, other crewmen were bleeding on the freezing deck, and the young pilot...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At first glance the little aircraft looks as though someone assembled it from the wrong box of parts. It has a wing at the front and a wing at the back, a propeller facing the wrong way, and a pilot perched right up in the nose. It looks less like a fighter than an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the mid-1950s, a needle-thin French aircraft with jet engines perched on its wingtips and a rocket motor in its belly clawed its way toward the edge of space, touching nearly twice the speed of sound and setting records for how fast a jet could climb. And then...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1946, Britain was perhaps six months away from becoming the first nation to fly faster than sound. In a guarded hangar sat a small, bullet-shaped jet called the Miles M.52, all but finished, its test pilot chosen, its supersonic trials pencilled in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine a fighter aircraft that cannot take off. It has no way to move under its own power on the runway, no way to build up speed, no way to leave the ground at all. To fly it, you must bolt it to the roof of an airliner, haul it up to altitude, and drop it — and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, London was under siege from a weapon no one could see coming until it was too late. The V-1 flying bomb — the “doodlebug” — buzzed across the Channel by the hundred, and its droning pulsejet was a sound Londoners learned to dread. When the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Half a century ago, the SEPECAT Jaguar screamed across the plains of northern Germany at treetop height, a nuclear bomb slung beneath its belly and the Warsaw Pact in its sights. France retired it in 2005. Britain let it go in 2007. Oman parked its last examples in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 24 September 1958, a flight of Nationalist Chinese F-86 Sabres was climbing over the Taiwan Strait when a formation of Communist MiG-17s slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no fighter had ever...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every so often a fighter comes along that wins its contest so completely that the argument simply stops. The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is that aircraft. It out-flew a rival prototype, rewrote what a fighter was supposed to do, and entered service as the most capable...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Dawn over Kadena, and the concrete is already trembling. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans spool up behind a jet the size of a small barn, the pilot walks the throttles into afterburner, and for a heartbeat the whole world is noise. Then the nose comes up — and keeps...
Recent Comments