Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
For a week in the summer of 1976, more than a hundred people sat on the floor of a disused airport terminal in the heart of Africa, four thousand kilometres from home, and waited to find out whether they would be murdered. They had been separated — Israelis and Jews...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At a quarter to eight on the morning of 5 June 1967, Egyptian air-defence officers were changing shifts, the dawn patrol had landed, and hundreds of Soviet-built fighters sat parked in neat rows across eighteen airfields. Within roughly three hours, most of them were...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Le problème était d'ordre géométrique. En 1943, un barrage allemand était un mur de maçonnerie de plus de trente mètres d'épaisseur à sa base, protégé par des filets anti-torpilles dans l'eau et des canons antiaériens sur sa crête. Une bombe larguée en altitude manquerait sa cible ; une torpille s'accrocherait aux filets ; une mine….
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Before dawn on 1 August 1943, the desert around Benghazi coughed itself awake. One hundred and seventy-eight B-24 Liberators, engines scoured half to death by Libyan sand, staggered off the runways with 3,100 US gallons (11,700 litres) of fuel and full bomb bays. More...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur, 23 September 1913, 5:47 in the morning. The sea is still grey, the air smells of salt and the burnt castor oil that every rotary engine of the era coughs over its pilot. A small, dark-eyed man settles into a Morane-Saulnier G — a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees something his...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Gate 15 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few minutes past midnight on the last day of August 1983. A Boeing 747 sits in the floodlights, doors open, while 246 passengers file aboard: businessmen bound for Taipei and Hong Kong, honeymooners, grandparents,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power, and lumbered...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Just before midnight on 1 July 2002, two aircraft converged over the Bodensee at 36,000 feet. One was a DHL Boeing 757 freighter climbing out of Bergamo with two pilots aboard. The other was a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 carrying 69 people from Moscow toward a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky, foreign parachutists...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard, rolling straight...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks above the green...
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