Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
A la una y un minuto de la madrugada del 20 de diciembre de 1989, la cálida oscuridad tropical que se extendía fuera del cuartel de la Fuerza de Defensa de Panamá en Río Hato se vio interrumpida por dos enormes explosiones. Los soldados cayeron de sus literas en medio de la confusión, escudriñando el cielo negro en busca de...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured rather than built....
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put bombs on it. For...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only place left for fuel...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if it ever crashed....
Mundo de la aviación, Historia y leyendas
On November 2, 1947, the largest flying boat ever built lifted off the water of Long Beach Harbor, flew for about a mile at seventy feet, and never flew again. In that single minute, Howard Hughes won an argument that had nearly destroyed him. The Hughes H-4 Hercules...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a turbojet buried in...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no air-breathing...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress first flew on April 15, 1952. The youngest airframe in the fleet was delivered in October 1962. Every B-52 flying today is older than every crew member flying it — and many are older than the crew members’ parents. The Air Force...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
On February 20, 1959 — a day Canadians still call “Black Friday” — Prime Minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the most advanced interceptor on the planet, fired 14,500 people, and ordered every prototype destroyed. Then, for good measure, he had the...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Half a century ago, the Shah of Iran bought 80 American F-14A Tomcats and 633 AIM-54 Phoenix long-range missiles for $2 billion. It was the most advanced fighter deal the United States had ever made with a foreign country.Then came the revolution, the hostage crisis,...
Historia y leyendas, Aviación militar
Before AWACS, air warfare was a knife fight in a dark room. Pilots relied on their own radar, ground controllers with limited visibility, and radio calls that were often confused, late, or wrong. After AWACS, one side had the lights on and the other did not. The...
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