History & Legends, Military Aviation
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Somewhere over central France in the late 1950s, test pilot André Turcat pushes a strange delta-winged aircraft past the speed where a normal jet engine begins to gasp for air. And that is when the Nord Griffon comes alive. Behind him, a ramjet the size of a small...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Tomorrow, as America’s 250th birthday flyovers thunder across the country, watch for the moment the crowd goes quiet. Four jets approach in perfect formation — and then one pulls up, streaming away from the others, climbing alone toward the vertical until...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 7 August 1942, over an island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in a fighter with no...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 280 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic exile was about to...
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