History & Legends, Military Aviation
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a new biplane...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1967, at the Dornier flight-test centre at Friedrichshafen, a strange aircraft lifted off the apron without using a runway. It had two main jet engines in conventional underwing pods and ten — yes, ten — additional pure lift engines clustered in pods at...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It cruised at Mach 2 — faster than any operational fighter then flying. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable streamlined pod slung beneath its...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let the tank glide...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 October 1934, at the Italian seaplane base of Desenzano del Garda on Lake Garda, a bright red aircraft with two enormous counter-rotating propellers screamed across the water at 440.681 miles per hour. The pilot, Warrant Officer Francesco Agello, climbed out of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The cake was laced with sleeping pills. The whole squadron ate it. That was Captain Alexander Zuyev’s plan, and on the night of 19 May 1989, at Mikha Tskhakaya air base in Soviet Georgia, it almost worked. The 27-year-old fighter pilot had decided he would steal...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Inside MiGFlug
Before the rockets. Before the electric cars became mainstream. Before Mars, before the tunnels, before the social media platform — there was a young South African entrepreneur in the Nevada desert, strapped into the cockpit of a Cold War-era jet, grinning beneath an...
History & Legends, Inside MiGFlug
It was 2007, somewhere in the Russian countryside near Vyazma, and Anthony Bourdain was climbing into the rear cockpit of a Soviet-era jet trainer with the same mix of excitement and barely concealed terror that he brought to every great adventure. The aircraft was an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Before the Global Positioning System existed — before the first satellite was even launched into the constellation — fighter jets were already screaming across continents at supersonic speed and arriving within metres of their targets. They did it using a technology...
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