History & Legends, Military Aviation
The skin glows a dull cherry red. At Mach 3.2, eighty thousand feet above the earth, the leading edges of the Blackbird climb past 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to soften aluminium like warm wax and bend ordinary steel out of true. Only one metal on the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Gray water, a steel-cold sky over Long Island Sound, and a sound you feel in your sternum before you hear it — the slap-slap-slap of six rotor blades clawing the air. Hanging above the surface is a Sikorsky CH-53, nose down, straining. Trailing from its belly is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Six miles above Budapest the air was forty degrees below zero, and the sky around the Flying Fortress named Mizpah had turned into a wall of black smoke and orange fire. It was 14 July 1944, and the flak over the Hungarian capital was the kind of fire that gunners on...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1970s were the decade Soviet aviation propaganda had to learn to live with second place. On 20 July 1969 — eighteen months before the new decade began — Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and every Soviet propaganda narrative built around the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Oberpfaffenhofen, a grey July morning in 1967. Ten engines spool up at once, and the sound is less a roar than a physical wall — sixteen jets of exhaust hammering the concrete, kerosene heat shimmering off the apron. Then, impossibly, a 22-tonne transport with a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gulf of Tonkin was a flat sheet of hammered silver under the late-June haze, and the little twin-boomed Bronco came down toward it trailing fire and smoke. Inside the front cockpit, Air Force Captain Steven L. Bennett had a parachute that worked perfectly, an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of October 11, 1989 began like any other in the Jezreel Valley. Beside a dusty crop-dusting strip near Megiddo, a worker named Ya’acov Aboudi was going about his business when the air split open with the shriek of a jet engine and a Soviet fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 12 April 1961, at 06:07 GMT, a Vostok-K rocket lifted off from Baikonur carrying Senior Lieutenant Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force into a 169-by-327 kilometre orbit around the Earth. The flight lasted 108 minutes. Gagarin’s last word before...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On November 1, 1952, the world’s first hydrogen bomb vaporized the island of Elugelab in the Marshall Islands. The explosion — designated Ivy Mike — produced a fireball three miles wide and a mushroom cloud that punched into the stratosphere. And while most sane...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft in the world took to the skies over southwest England. The Bristol Brabazon was a colossus — its 230-foot wingspan exceeded that of a modern Boeing 747. It was powered by eight radial engines coupled in pairs to drive...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the early hours of September 30, 1956, the patrons of a Washington Heights bar were treated to a sight that nobody in New York City — before or since — has witnessed at closing time. A single-engine Cessna touched down on St. Nicholas Avenue, rolled to a stop in...
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