History & Legends, Military Aviation
For a few days in the autumn of 1953, the fastest aircraft on Earth was British, and it was called the Supermarine Swift. Then the same aircraft became one of the most embarrassing fighters the Royal Air Force ever bought. The Swift is the rare jet that set a world...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Gloster Javelin was a first and a warning wrapped in one big delta wing. It was the Royal Air Force’s first purpose-built all-weather interceptor and Britain’s first delta-winged fighter — a genuinely modern machine for the early 1950s. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Britain’s second jet fighter was, in part, made of wood. It had two tail booms instead of one fuselage, an engine that sat behind the pilot like a barrel, and a plywood nose that traced its ancestry straight back to the Mosquito. It looked improvised. It was...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Line the Folland Gnat up next to almost any other jet fighter and it looks like a scale model that wandered onto the ramp by mistake. It is shorter than a Spitfire. A tall pilot practically wears it. And yet this pocket-sized British jet became the original mount of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 7 July 1946, the richest man in America climbed into an unproven silver aircraft and took off alone, against the advice of everyone around him. Just over an hour later, Howard Hughes was lying in the burning wreckage of a Beverly Hills living room,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1996, a jet took off from a secret airfield in the Nevada desert that looked less like an aircraft and more like a prop from a science-fiction film. Faceless, tailless, hunched, its single engine hidden inside its spine, it slipped through the sky in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a fighter shaped like a dinner plate. Not a sleek dart, not a graceful sweep of wings — a fat, near-circular disc with a bubble canopy stuck on top and two enormous propellers windmilling at the tips. It looks like something that should be hovering over a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 October 1954, a Royal Navy pilot named Lieutenant B.D. Macfarlane was catapulted off the carrier HMS Albion when his engine died. His aircraft flopped into the sea directly ahead of the ship, which then ran straight over it, slicing the fighter in two. Trapped...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In December 1931, a cocky 21-year-old RAF pilot named Douglas Bader tried a low, showy roll in his biplane, clipped a wingtip on the grass, and crashed. Surgeons took his right leg above the knee that day, and his left below the knee months later. His flying career,...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks, and haul them...
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