Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Kelly Johnson built the F-104 Starfighter to do one thing: climb fast, fly high, and kill Soviet bombers before they reached American cities. The Lockheed engineer surveyed Korean War fighter pilots in 1951 and concluded that what they wanted was not another heavy,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the afternoon of 6 April 1965, test pilot Roland “Bee” Beamont was having lunch at a pub near Boscombe Down when the BBC news bulletin came through the radio. Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan, midway through his Budget Speech in the House of...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In September 1967, an ungainly four-engine turboprop lumbered off the runway at Nha Trang Air Base in South Vietnam. It looked like any other C-130 Hercules — the workhorse cargo plane that had been hauling troops, ammunition, and jeeps across theatre since the early...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Argentina went to war in the Falklands in April 1982 with five air-launched Exocet missiles. Five. That was the entire stock — France had delivered the AM39 variant along with a handful of Super Étendard strike fighters just months before the conflict began, and the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the morning of April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Fighter Two airstrip on Guadalcanal and turned west over the Solomon Sea. Their mission was not to engage enemy formations or escort bombers. It was to kill one man: Admiral Isoroku...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune, without ever doing the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second crewman. This...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers — a fake...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
There is expensive, and then there is “costs more than Air Force One.” The VH-71 Kestrel, the helicopter that was supposed to become the next Marine One, somehow managed the second one. By the time anyone added it all up, the bill for 28 of them had passed...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Late in the afternoon of 7 June 1981, eight Israeli F-16s are skimming the desert at rooftop height, fuel gauges a constant worry. Flying the last and most exposed aircraft in the formation is the youngest of them, a 27-year-old named Ilan Ramon, who has done the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky, throwing the anchored...
Commenti recenti