Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts the twin-section Allison turboprop driving its 16-foot contra-rotating...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Glue two P-51 Mustangs together along the wing. Share a tailplane between them. Put the radio operator’s seat in the right fuselage. Tell the pilot in the left fuselage to fly the aircraft. The result is the F-82 Twin Mustang — the longest-range piston fighter...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
He had been awake for 23 hours before he even took off. Charles Lindbergh spent the night of 19 May 1927 in a hotel near Roosevelt Field, Long Island, unable to sleep, while rain hammered the airfield and weather reports from the Atlantic were ambiguous at best. At...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Every military pilot flying today sits on a device that can blast them out of a crippled aircraft in a fraction of a second. From the moment of handle pull to full parachute deployment takes less than two seconds. The seat fires its occupant at up to 20g and 600 mph...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Of all the strange aircraft the United States built during the Second World War — and there were many — none was stranger, on paper or in person, than the Northrop XP-79. The XP-79 has gone down in history as a manned missile. Its mission, so the famous story goes,...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The standard British Quick Reaction Alert intercept, in the Cold War era, went something like this. NATO radar would call out an unidentified contact entering the United Kingdom Air Defence Region. Two RAF Phantom FGR.2s, held at ten minutes’ readiness around...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
Louis Blériot was flying on a badly burned foot. His monoplane — a fragile structure of spruce, ash, and rubberised canvas — had a 25-horsepower engine that overheated on long runs. He had no compass. No radio. No life jacket. As he climbed to 250 feet over the...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
In 1924, flying around the world meant crossing the Pacific Ocean in open biplanes, with engines that had to be rebuilt every few thousand miles, relying on supply ships pre-positioned across the widest ocean on Earth by a US Navy that had deployed its vessels months...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
They were bicycle mechanics. No formal engineering degrees, no government funding, no team of PhDs. Just Wilbur and Orville Wright, a shed in Dayton, Ohio, and an obsession that bordered on madness. By the time they arrived at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina in...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
The US Army Air Forces didn’t want them. The military establishment was convinced, and had “proved” through pseudo-scientific studies, that Black men lacked the intelligence, the nerve, and the coordination to fly combat aircraft. When political...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
For 34 consecutive days, we celebrated the greatest fighter aces in history — from Adolphe Pégoud, the Frenchman who invented aerial combat, to M.M. Alam, the Pakistani ace who downed five aircraft in under a minute. If you missed any of those posts, they live...
Histoire et légendes, Aviation militaire
On 18 April 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, sixteen B-25 Mitchell medium bombers launched from the deck of USS Hornet — something that had never been done before and would never be attempted again — and flew 1,000 miles to bomb Tokyo. The military damage they...
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