History & Legends, Military Aviation
At Wisley Aerodrome in Surrey on 18 May 1951, the prototype Vickers Type 660 — registration WB210, the future Valiant — lifted off the runway for the first time. Test pilot “Mutt” Summers, the same man who had taken the prototype Spitfire airborne sixteen...
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 352.46 mph across a measured course in Santa Ana, California — faster than any aeroplane in history had ever flown. He was 29 years old, had already...
Aviation World, History & Legends
No pilot in aviation history provokes quite the same mixture of awe and unease as Hanna Reitsch. She was the first woman to fly a helicopter. The first woman to fly a rocket-powered aircraft. The first — and only — woman to receive both the Iron Cross Second Class and...
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
On June 9, 2011, a Hellenic Air Force Mirage 2000-5 Mk.2 suffered a catastrophic engine failure during a training flight near the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean Sea. The two-person crew — pilot and navigator — ejected successfully and were recovered by Greek...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the early 1950s, Sweden’s military planners faced a terrifying arithmetic problem. The Soviet Union could, in theory, send hundreds of bombers across the Baltic toward Stockholm in a matter of minutes. Sweden was neutral, vastly outnumbered, and could not...
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
The Syrian radar operators in the Bekaa Valley did not know they were being watched. They did not know that the strange drone orbiting lazily at altitude above them was not a reconnaissance aircraft but a lure — that the moment they switched on their SA-6 Gainful fire...
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...
English
Recent Comments