Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
In September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft in the world took to the skies over southwest England. The Bristol Brabazon was a colossus — its 230-foot wingspan exceeded that of a modern Boeing 747. It was powered by eight radial engines coupled in pairs to drive...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On April 25, 1982, a collection of British helicopters did something that hadn’t been done since World War II: they put a submarine out of action from the air. The target was ARA Santa Fe, an Argentine submarine caught on the surface near South Georgia Island...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On August 17, 1943, the United States Eighth Air Force launched what would become one of the most devastating bombing missions in the history of aerial warfare. The target was Germany’s ball bearing industry — a chokepoint that Allied planners believed could...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On May 10, 1970, an SR-71A Blackbird designated 61-7969 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. It would never return. What happened in the skies over Southeast Asia that day remains one of...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the evening of 4 March 1957, a US Navy patrol blimp lifted off the apron at Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and pointed itself east, towards the Atlantic Ocean. Its envelope was 343 feet long. Its registration was Bureau Number 141561 and its name,...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Somewhere outside the Siberian town of Abakan, in the Republic of Khakassia, there is a packed-snow airstrip about 200 metres long. It is the only way to get into a village called Nizhny Kurlugash in the winter months. The strip is serviced, twice a week, by a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 23 February 2004, the Acting Secretary of the Army — a former Senate staffer and Vietnam veteran named Les Brownlee — stood at a Pentagon podium with the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, and announced the cancellation of one of the most...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Beauty in aviation is a real engineering property. The aircraft that pilots, photographers, and aviation historians consistently call the most beautiful are not pretty by accident — they are pretty because every line, every fairing, every panel break is doing work....
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in Connecticut, and...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling liquid. It is not...
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