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...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every military pilot flying today sits on a device that can blast them out of a crippled aircraft in a fraction of a second. From the moment of handle pull to full parachute deployment takes less than two seconds. The seat fires its occupant at up to 20g and 600 mph...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1961 the Soviet Union flew an aircraft with a working nuclear reactor on board. The aircraft was a modified Tupolev Tu-95 Bear, redesignated Tu-95LAL — Letayushchaya Atomnaya Laboratoriya, or “Flying Atomic Laboratory.” The reactor sat in the rear of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The British, in the 1950s, came up with one of the most elegant interceptor concepts of the early jet age — and then, in a moment of breathtaking strategic clumsiness, threw the entire programme away. The aircraft was the Saunders-Roe SR.53, a small, beautiful, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Of all the strange aircraft the United States built during the Second World War — and there were many — none was stranger, on paper or in person, than the Northrop XP-79. The XP-79 was, in concept, a manned missile. Its mission was not to shoot down enemy bombers with...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 6 January 1940, the temperature over southeastern Finland sat at minus thirty-two degrees Celsius. A flight of seven Soviet Ilyushin DB-3 bombers crossed the frontier on a routine raid against Finnish railway lines. They flew without fighter escort....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The standard British Quick Reaction Alert intercept, in the Cold War era, went something like this. NATO radar would call out an unidentified contact entering the United Kingdom Air Defence Region. Two RAF Phantom FGR.2s would be airborne in under five minutes. They...
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