Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
It is a little after dawn on 15 August 1945, and a flight of Grumman F6F Hellcats is droning north over the haze of Tokyo Bay. In the cockpits are young U.S. Navy pilots of Air Group 88, launched from the carrier USS Yorktown to strike airfields near the Japanese...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
In September 1944, with Allied bombers reducing German cities to rubble and the Luftwaffe haemorrhaging experienced pilots at an unsustainable rate, the Reich Air Ministry issued one of the most desperate specifications in aviation history: design a jet fighter that...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On 15 April 1988, a modified Tupolev Tu-154 airliner took off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airfield with one of its three engines running on liquid hydrogen. It climbed to altitude, flew a circuit, and landed without incident. The aircraft was designated Tu-155, and...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On the night of 11 November 1940, twenty-one Fairey Swordfish biplanes — fabric-covered, open-cockpit torpedo bombers with a top speed of 139 miles per hour — attacked the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour. When they were done, three battleships were sinking,...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
We have written before about the F-8 Crusader’s legendary status as the “Last of the Gunfighters” — the Navy jet that went to war over Vietnam armed primarily with four 20 mm Colt Mk 12 cannon when every other fighter in the fleet was transitioning...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
The Germans had a word for it. They always do. When Luftwaffe pilots talked about the Panavia Tornado, they called it the eierlegende Wollmilchsau — the “egg-laying wool-milk pig.” A mythical creature that does everything: lays eggs, produces wool, gives...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Muammar Gaddafi zog eine Linie quer durch das Mittelmeer und forderte die US-Marine heraus, sie zu überschreiten. Die Marine überschritt sie zweimal. Beide Male antworteten F-14 Tomcats. Die beiden Zwischenfälle im Golf von Sidra – 1981 und 1989 – sind die einzigen amerikanischen Luft-Luft-Abschüsse der 1980er Jahre. Sie….
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is physically violent...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
It is just after ten in the morning on 19 June 1944, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander Vraciu is hanging in the blue over the Philippine Sea, hood back, oxygen mask tight, hunting. Below and ahead of his Grumman F6F Hellcat, a loose gaggle of Japanese dive...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
It is mid-morning on 8 June 2026 at Ellington Field in Houston, and Harry “D-Day” Daye is strapping into a machine that has not left the ground in seven years. The ramp smells of jet fuel and Texas heat. Behind him sits Jerod Flohr, one of the volunteers who spent the...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome cast it...
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