Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
By the summer of 1944, London was under siege from a weapon no one could see coming until it was too late. The V-1 flying bomb — the “doodlebug” — buzzed across the Channel by the hundred, and its droning pulsejet was a sound Londoners learned to dread. When the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Half a century ago, the SEPECAT Jaguar screamed across the plains of northern Germany at treetop height, a nuclear bomb slung beneath its belly and the Warsaw Pact in its sights. France retired it in 2005. Britain let it go in 2007. Oman parked its last examples in...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the morning of 24 September 1958, a flight of Nationalist Chinese F-86 Sabres was climbing over the Taiwan Strait when a formation of Communist MiG-17s slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no fighter had ever...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Ogni tanto capita di vedere un caccia che vince la sua sfida in modo così netto da porre fine a ogni discussione. Il Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor è proprio questo tipo di aereo. Ha surclassato un prototipo rivale, ha riscritto il ruolo di un caccia ed è entrato in servizio come il più performante...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Dawn over Kadena, and the concrete is already trembling. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans spool up behind a jet the size of a small barn, the pilot walks the throttles into afterburner, and for a heartbeat the whole world is noise. Then the nose comes up — and keeps...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
La maggior parte dei piloti da caccia segue lo stesso percorso stretto: scuola di volo, nomina a ufficiale, cabina di pilotaggio prima ancora di avere l'età per noleggiare un'auto senza sovrapprezzo. Kenneth Gilmore ha iniziato grazie a un programma di football americano. Prima ancora di provare le forze G, disegnava schemi di gioco su un...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Somewhere over the Nevada high desert, a young American fighter pilot rolls into a turn and sees something that should not exist. A stubby, silver dart is sliding into formation off his wing — snub nose, sharp delta, a red star where a national insignia ought to be....
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Some Cold War weapons were terrifying. A few were beautiful. And then there was the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 — a machine that looked like a flying saucer had mated with a submarine, and was built, in all seriousness, to stalk and kill American nuclear missile boats. It...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Seen from the ground, it looked like an accident waiting to happen: a single-seat fighter — a Messerschmitt Bf 109 or a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 — bolted rigidly to the spine of a twin-engined Junkers Ju 88 bomber, the two machines climbing away as one grotesque,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Autumn, 1933. On a grass airfield outside Kharkiv, a shape rolls out of its hangar that looks less like an aeroplane and more like a building that has decided to fly. Its wing stretches 53 metres from tip to tip — thick enough for a grown man to walk inside it and...
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