Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Nel pomeriggio del 12 settembre 1943, una serie di fragili alianti di compensato atterrò su un altopiano roccioso in alta quota nell'Appennino italiano, proprio di fronte a un albergo di montagna. Da essi uscirono paracadutisti tedeschi e commando delle SS. Nel giro di pochi minuti...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
At 27,000 feet over Germany, the air was minus 60 degrees and Charlie Brown’s bomber was dying. Half its engines were gone or failing. The nose was blown open to the wind. The tail gunner was dead, other crewmen were bleeding on the freezing deck, and the young pilot...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
At first glance the little aircraft looks as though someone assembled it from the wrong box of parts. It has a wing at the front and a wing at the back, a propeller facing the wrong way, and a pilot perched right up in the nose. It looks less like a fighter than an...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In the mid-1950s, a needle-thin French aircraft with jet engines perched on its wingtips and a rocket motor in its belly clawed its way toward the edge of space, touching nearly twice the speed of sound and setting records for how fast a jet could climb. And then...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In the winter of 1946, Britain was perhaps six months away from becoming the first nation to fly faster than sound. In a guarded hangar sat a small, bullet-shaped jet called the Miles M.52, all but finished, its test pilot chosen, its supersonic trials pencilled in...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Imagine a fighter aircraft that cannot take off. It has no way to move under its own power on the runway, no way to build up speed, no way to leave the ground at all. To fly it, you must bolt it to the roof of an airliner, haul it up to altitude, and drop it — and...
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...
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