Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Quatre minutes après son décollage de l'aéroport de Singapour Changi le 4 novembre 2010, le vol Qantas 32 prenait de l'altitude (7 400 pieds) lorsque les passagers entendirent une détonation, puis une seconde, plus forte, qui fit trembler la cabine. Dans le cockpit, le commandant Richard de….
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Le 18 février 1944 à midi, les gardiens de la prison d'Amiens s'attablent pour déjeuner, comme tous les jours. Dehors, la neige recouvrait la Picardie d'un épais manteau blanc et le ciel était bas et gris. À l'intérieur du bâtiment cruciforme, derrière un mur d'enceinte de trois mètres et demi de haut, se trouvaient des centaines de….
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the morning of Saturday, 27 October 1962, Major Rudolf “Rudy” Anderson Jr. was sealed into his pressure suit at McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida. He was not on the schedule that day — he had lobbied hard for the mission. It would be his sixth flight over...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 27 February 1959, three British oilmen were driving across a gravel plain deep in the Libyan Sahara, hundreds of miles from anything, when a twin-tailed shape rose out of the heat shimmer. It was an American heavy bomber, broken in two just behind the wings, lying...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them beside it. They...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
C'est le soir du 27 octobre 1962, et à bord du sous-marin soviétique B-59, quelque part au nord de Cuba, la température a dépassé les 45 degrés Celsius et l'air se raréfie. Les batteries sont presque à plat. Des hommes s'évanouissent à leurs postes. Pendant des heures, les sous-mariniers américains...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 28 July 1944, P-51 pilots of the 359th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s away from Merseburg when someone called out contrails high at six o’clock. Two stubby, tailless shapes came slicing down through the formation faster than anything the Americans had...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
A few minutes past midnight on 24 January 1961, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb drifted down through the winter darkness over Wayne County, North Carolina, swinging beneath a 30-metre (100-foot) parachute. It settled nose-first into a field near the hamlet of Faro and came to...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
In the autumn of 1932, a small, barrel-chested aeroplane painted red and white sat on a Cleveland airfield looking less like an aircraft than a cartoon of one. It was almost all engine — a giant radial nose bolted to a stubby fuselage, with the cockpit shoved so far...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On the afternoon of August 16, 1956, residents of the Los Angeles suburbs looked up to a strange and frankly alarming sight: two jet fighters chasing a lone, pilotless aircraft in tightening circles, hurling rockets at it — and missing, again and again, while the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved back and a...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of the blades. To...
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