History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a French airfield in 1916, you might have found two lion cubs named Whiskey and Soda padding between the tents, and a group of young Americans who had crossed an ocean to fight a war their own country had not yet joined. This was the Escadrille Lafayette —...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous pilot alive and one of the most controversial men in America. He had crossed the Atlantic alone in 1927 and been adored for it. Then he had campaigned to keep the United States out of the war, clashed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of December 8, 1941, the same Japanese offensive that had just shattered Pearl Harbor reached a speck of coral 2,000 miles to the west. Wake Island was barely three low islets around a lagoon — a refuelling stop with an airstrip, a few hundred...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
You could identify it from the ground before you could hear it: two long booms, a pod slung between them, and a wing that seemed to float without a fuselage behind it. Nothing else in the sky of 1942 looked remotely like the P-38 Lightning — and, according to...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all but a handful had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with the most...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name stuck for the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy aircraft than any...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down here. Climb, and...
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