Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
It was meant to be one of the shortest, dullest legs in the timetable. At 19:52 on 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 climbed away from London Heathrow bound for Belfast, a Boeing 737-400 with 118 passengers and eight crew aboard. The aircraft was almost...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
On the morning of 27 March 1977, neither KLM Flight 4805 nor Pan Am Flight 1736 was meant to be anywhere near Tenerife. Both Boeing 747s were bound for Gran Canaria when a bomb planted by a separatist group tore through the terminal at Las Palmas. With a warning of a...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
There are aircraft one admires, and there are aircraft one falls a little in love with. The Latécoère 631 belongs firmly to the second category. Conceived in Toulouse, the spiritual home of French aviation, she was the last and grandest of the great...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
By 1943 the arithmetic over Germany had turned against the Luftwaffe. American daylight bomber streams — the tight, mutually-defending boxes of B-17s and B-24s — were arriving in numbers that piston fighters could not blunt fast enough. Blohm & Voss...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Few aircraft have been asked to carry as much mythology on so little lift as the Sack AS-6. Search the phrase ‘Nazi flying saucer’ and this stubby, disc-winged machine appears again and again, presented as evidence that the Third Reich was on the verge of...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
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...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
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...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
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...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
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...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
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...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
A bystander in Wichita, Kansas points a phone at the sky. A large, grey, tailless shape slides overhead near McConnell Air Force Base. The footage is shaky, the shape is unmistakable-but-not-quite — and within hours the internet has decided it just filmed...
Militärische Luftfahrt, Nachricht
Five months after two Iranian bombers were blown out of the sky short of a US air base in Qatar, a strange and very human question has resurfaced: what happened to the men who were flying them? On 15 August, Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff claimed that Qatar...
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