À l'intérieur de MiGFlug, Aviation militaire
“I feel the need — the need for speed.” “Talk to me, Goose.” Four decades after Top Gun first lit up the screen, those lines still make grown adults want to sprint to the nearest aircraft carrier. And almost all of them, sooner or later,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for potential airline...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The routine was impossible. Bob Hoover would take off in his Rockwell Shrike Commander — a twin-engine business aircraft, not an aerobatic plane — climb to altitude, and shut both engines off. Then, on nothing but momentum and gravity, he would fly a loop and an...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 13 September 1935, Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of a sleek silver racer of his own design and flew it at 352.39 mph across a measured course in Santa Ana, California — faster than any landplane in history had ever flown. He was 29 years old, had already...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The admirals were convinced it was impossible. You simply could not sink a battleship from the air. Battleships were armoured fortresses, built to absorb punishment from naval guns. Bombs dropped from altitude, they argued, would never hit anything. General Billy...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Before Glenn Curtiss had ever sat in an aeroplane, he was already the fastest man in the world. On 23 January 1907, he rode a V8-engined motorcycle of his own construction at 136.3 mph across a measured mile in Ormond Beach, Florida. It was the fastest a human being...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
James Harold Doolittle flew two flights that changed the world — and they could scarcely have been more different. The first was on 24 September 1929, at Mitchel Field, Long Island, when he climbed into a Consolidated NY-2 biplane with a fabric hood pulled over the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 11 July 1949, a seaplane carrying Jacqueline Auriol — daughter-in-law of the French President — crashed on the Seine near Paris. She was pulled from the wreckage with catastrophic facial injuries. Surgeons rebuilt her face through more than twenty operations spread...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
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