History & Legends, Military Aviation
The air over the Yellow Sea, that morning, smelled of brine and avgas. It was August 13, 1945. Forty-eight hours from the surrender. Above the muggy haze, in the cockpit of a Republic P-47N called Lil Meaties Meat Chopper, a 26-year-old lieutenant from El Paso watched...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Boeing YAL-1 was an exercise in audacious physics. Take a 747-400F freighter. Cut open the nose. Bolt in a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser the size of six SUVs. Aim it at a ballistic missile climbing through the atmosphere at Mach 7, and pump enough...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the evening of 27 September 1946, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. — son of the great Sir Geoffrey de Havilland — pushed a small, swept-wing experimental jet called the DH.108 Swallow into a high-speed dive over the Thames Estuary. He was evaluating the jet’s...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Fifteen seconds. That was the gap between Lt Col William “Skate” Parks and Maj Michael “Danger” Blea and an early end to their Wild Weasel sortie over Yemen. Their strike package had already hit its targets and the jets were turning for home...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 23 February 2008 at 10:30 local time, Spirit of Kansas — a Northrop Grumman B-2A stealth bomber, USAF tail number 89-0127 — taxied out for take-off on runway 06L at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. The crew, Captain Justin Grieve and Major Ryan Link, had run their...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The 1930s were the decade Stalin made aviation a state religion. The propaganda machinery he inherited from the 1920s — Khayt’s Aviamarsh, the Dobrolyot postal posters, the early Osoaviakhim mass-membership organisation — was, by the time the first Five-Year...
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