Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Late in the afternoon of 7 June 1981, eight Israeli F-16s are skimming the desert at rooftop height, fuel gauges a constant worry. Flying the last and most exposed aircraft in the formation is the youngest of them, a 27-year-old named Ilan Ramon, who has done the...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky, throwing the anchored...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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,...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Los alemanes tenían una palabra para ello. Siempre la tienen. Cuando los pilotos de la Luftwaffe hablaban del Panavia Tornado, lo llamaban eierlegende Wollmilchsau —el “cerdo lechero que pone huevos”. Una criatura mítica que lo hace todo: pone huevos, produce lana, da...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Muamar Gadafi trazó una línea en el Mediterráneo y desafió a la Armada de los Estados Unidos a cruzarla. La Armada la cruzó dos veces. En ambas ocasiones, los F-14 Tomcat respondieron. Los dos incidentes del Golfo de Sidra —1981 y 1989— son los únicos derribos aéreos estadounidenses de la década de 1980.
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
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...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Son poco después de las diez de la mañana del 19 de junio de 1944, y el teniente (grado inferior) Alexander Vraciu sobrevuela el mar de Filipinas en un avión azul, con la capucha puesta y la máscara de oxígeno bien ajustada, en plena caza. Debajo y delante de su Grumman F6F Hellcat, un grupo disperso de aviones de combate japoneses...
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