History & Legends, Military Aviation
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
You know what a B-17 looks like. Four radial engines. Twin tail. Glass nose. Heavy-bomber Americana, stamped onto a thousand black-and-white photographs of the daylight raids over Germany. Now picture one with a fifth engine bolted to its nose — a giant turboprop, or...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 May 1940, a Russian-born immigrant in his early fifties stood in a field in Stratford, Connecticut, climbed into a flimsy contraption made of welded steel tubing, and lifted himself one and a half metres into the air. He hovered for fifteen seconds, set the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Three were built. Three flew. One crashed. Two went into storage. None ever entered service. The Lockheed YF-12 is one of those aircraft that should have rewritten the book on continental air defence and instead became a footnote — overshadowed by the SR-71 Blackbird...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 January 1964, a B-52H Stratofortress assigned to the 4239th Strategic Wing was on a routine training flight over the Susquehanna Valley in Maryland when it flew into the worst clear-air turbulence anyone aboard had ever experienced. There was no warning, no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 1 November 1950, UN pilots over North Korea encountered something they had not expected: a swept-wing jet fighter faster, more agile, and better armed than anything in their inventory. The MiG-15 appeared above the Yalu River — the border between North Korea and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a photograph from the Second World War that stops you in your tracks. A young man sits in what looks like an oversized tin can, mounted on a swivelling platform, aiming a machine gun at a target while the entire contraption bucks and wobbles beneath him. He...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was the fastest fighter at low level in the Royal Air Force inventory, faster than the Spitfire below 15,000 feet. It carried four 20mm cannons in its nose — twice the firepower of any other British fighter. It first flew in October 1938 and entered service in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts two contra-rotating turboprops driving 16-foot propellers. He releases the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Glue two P-51 Mustangs together along the wing. Share a tailplane between them. Put the radio operator’s seat in the right fuselage. Tell the pilot in the left fuselage to fly the aircraft. The result is the F-82 Twin Mustang — the longest-range piston fighter...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 18 November 1952, Lieutenant E. Royce Williams climbed into the cockpit of a Grumman F9F-5 Panther on the deck of USS Oriskany, off the coast of North Korea, and went looking for trouble. Forty-five minutes later he came back with his only engine on fire, no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
He had been awake for 23 hours before he even took off. Charles Lindbergh spent the night of 19 May 1927 in a hotel near Roosevelt Field, Long Island, unable to sleep, while rain hammered the airfield and weather reports from the Atlantic were ambiguous at best. At...
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