History & Legends, Military Aviation
If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you will see one thing the museum guides will quietly refuse to explain: a small puddle of clear, kerosene-smelling liquid...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It looks like a Soviet defector’s nightmare. Four giant ducted fans, each two metres in diameter, mounted on the corners of a stubby fuselage, tilting independently between horizontal and vertical flight. The whole machine hangs from those four fans like a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
If a fighter pilot ever has to pull the handle between his knees, the next quarter of a second of his life is going to take roughly two centimetres off his height. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. By the time the canopy clears and the seat is climbing on its rocket...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 10 April 1963, at the Entwicklungsring Süd flight-test centre in Manching, Bavaria, a small twin-tailed jet with six engines lifted itself off the tarmac vertically. There was no nozzle deflection like a Harrier. There were no rotors like a helicopter. The four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The cargo on the back of the aircraft is roughly twice as wide as the aircraft itself. The cargo also weighs 50 tonnes. The cargo is a Soviet Buran space shuttle missing its vertical stabiliser, strapped to the spine of a strategic bomber from which the original tail...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Rockwell B-1B Lancer took its first flight on 23 March 1983 — and it should never have happened. Six years earlier, on 30 June 1977, President Jimmy Carter had stood in the White House Briefing Room and killed the programme that built it. “The B-1 bomber...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 9 November 1958, a British oil-exploration crew flying a Silver City Airways Dakota across the eastern Libyan Sahara saw something on the sand below that should not have been there. It was an aircraft. A whole one, almost. Broken in two, but still...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
“Six turning, four burning” is one of the great aviation phrases. The six are 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Majors, mounted backwards along the trailing edge of the wing, swinging massive pusher propellers through air thinner than any...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The Lockheed U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson at Skunk Works in 1955 to fly at 70,000 feet, photograph Soviet missile silos in colour, and never — under any circumstances — go anywhere near a body of water. The U-2 had bicycle landing gear. The U-2 had a 31-metre...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The pilots call it the White Swan. NATO calls it Blackjack. Either way, the Tupolev Tu-160 is the largest, heaviest, fastest combat aircraft ever built — a 110-metre wingspan of variable-sweep wing, a 275-ton maximum takeoff weight, four 25,000-kilogram-force...
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