History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind the wings, lying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them beside it. They...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours, American depth...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the Americans had...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of Faro and came to...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
On July 4, virtually everything in the US military that flies made an appearance over Washington. Three bombers in one formation. Eight Thunderbirds. A brand-new Air Force One with a Raptor escort. The one aircraft everybody on the internet was actually waiting for...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and again, while the...
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