History & Legends, Military Aviation
In August 1941, RAF Fighter Command began receiving reports it did not know how to explain. Spitfire pilots returning from sweeps over occupied France described a radial-engined fighter that could outrun, outclimb, and outroll everything they flew. At first, British...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the summer of 1941, roughly 300 American men — mostly military pilots and ground crew — quietly resigned their commissions, signed contracts with a fictional Chinese company, and boarded ships bound for Burma. They weren’t soldiers. Not officially. They were...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine a fighter that crashes one in every four times it tries to land on a carrier. A fighter whose engines flame out so often the squadron commander tells his pilots to assume both have failed before every approach. A fighter so universally hated that the deck...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver was flying an SR-71 Blackbird at 78,000 feet over New Mexico at Mach 3.18. Behind him sat reconnaissance systems officer Jim Zwayer. They were testing a new navigation system when the aircraft’s right engine suffered a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit had a basic compass, an airspeed indicator, and a single switch that started three solid-fuel rocket motors. There was no landing gear. There was no parachute. The pilot,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath the wing of a Boeing B-50 Superfortress,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Take a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress. Remove the nose. Bolt a jet engine where the bombardier used to sit. Now fly it. That is not a thought experiment. From 1947 to 1966, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation did exactly that — operating a modified B-17G as an airborne...
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...
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