Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Nel 1942 Eddie Rickenbacker aveva già sfidato la morte più volte di quante la maggior parte degli uomini ci provi. Era l'"asso degli assi" americano della Prima Guerra Mondiale, un ex pilota della 500 Miglia di Indianapolis e l'inflessibile capo della Eastern Air Lines. Era all'inizio della sua...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
Nel pomeriggio del 24 maggio 1988, un Boeing 737-300 quasi nuovo si faceva strada tra le celle temporalesche in avvicinamento a New Orleans. Sul sedile di sinistra sedeva il capitano Carlos Dárdano, ventinove anni, che volava con un occhio solo, l'altro perso a causa di una sparatoria...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On paper, the Yakovlev Yak-38 looked like Moscow’s answer to the Harrier: a jet that could rise straight off a deck with no catapult, hover, and land vertically. In practice it was one of the most compromised combat aircraft of the Cold War.The Soviet Navy...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Prima dell'alba del giorno di Capodanno del 1945, mentre gran parte del campo alleato dormiva ancora dopo i festeggiamenti, centinaia di caccia tedeschi decollarono in un silenzio quasi totale. Niente radio. Mappe incomplete. Piloti che, in molti casi, avevano saputo solo pochi minuti prima dove si trovavano...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
He was twenty-one, a copper miner’s son from Phoenix with a boxer’s swagger and a habit of ignoring orders. In the last September of the First World War, Second Lieutenant Frank Luke Jr. turned himself into the most feared balloon-hunter in the skies over...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Grumman built the F8F Bearcat around one brutal idea: take the biggest engine America had and wrap the smallest possible aeroplane around it. The result was less a fighter than an engine with a saddle — an 18-cylinder radial hauling a featherweight airframe into...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the morning of 21 September 1953, a flight line at Kimpo Air Base watched a swept-wing jet swing onto the approach and took it for one of their own F-86 Sabres. It wasn’t. It was a Soviet-built MiG-15, still wearing North Korean red stars, flown by a...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On Christmas Eve 1944, American troops dug in near Liège heard something wrong in the sky. Not the familiar growl of piston engines, but a smooth, piercing roar. Sleek aircraft swept overhead, dropped their bombs, and simply accelerated away. No Allied fighter...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
It was the most meticulously rehearsed rescue mission in modern US military history — and it saved nobody. In the pre-dawn dark of 21 November 1970, a joint Army–Air Force strike force punched 23 miles into North Vietnam, straight past Hanoi’s...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the morning of 7 August 1945 — the day after Hiroshima — a small, silver twin-jet lifted off the runway at Kisarazu Naval Air Base. For about twenty minutes, Lieutenant Commander Susumu Takaoka flew Japan’s first jet aircraft, the Nakajima Kikka,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In the 1930s the Atlantic was aviation’s unconquered ocean. Airships had crossed it, but no commercial heavier-than-air machine could carry paying cargo the whole way in a single hop. The physics was brutally simple: a flying boat heavy enough with fuel to reach...
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