History & Legends, Military Aviation
Here is a fact that sounds invented: to bail out of the Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster, you first had to blow your own propellers off. The two blades spinning behind the tail would have shredded anyone who jumped, so Douglas wired the tailcone with explosives to fling the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1925, somewhere in the American countryside, Willard Ray Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof clean off a barn. Most people would have seen a repair bill. Custer saw physics. The roof had not moved forward — yet it rose. He reasoned that lift did not...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
It was a little after ten on the night of 24 March 1944, and the pine woods of Lower Silesia were locked hard in frost. Some yards short of the tree line, the earth stirred, then opened. A head appeared, then a pair of shoulders in a made-over greatcoat, and a man...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the autumn of 1940, a young man from Iowa or California or Brooklyn would stand at a Canadian train station with a suitcase and a lie ready on his lips. He was not, officially, going to war. His government had made that illegal. Joining the armed forces of a nation...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the Philippine Sea at mid-morning on 19 June 1944. The water is glassy, the horizon hazed with heat, and 25,000 feet up a Grumman Hellcat pilot is watching a stain spread across the sky to the west. It is not weather. It is aircraft — dozens, then...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In June 1941 the United States rolled out a bomber so large that a B-17 could have parked under one of its wings. The Douglas XB-19 spanned 212 feet, carried sleeping bunks and a kitchen for its relief crew, and was, for a time, the largest aircraft ever to fly in...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a freezing April night in 1978, a South Korean airliner full of sleeping passengers wandered a thousand miles off course, over one of the most secret corners of the Soviet Union, and was hit by an air-to-air missile. What happened next is one of the most...
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