Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And with that...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit held only rudimentary instruments — an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator — and the controls to fire three solid-fuel rocket motors. There was no...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath a Boeing B-50 Superfortress mothership,...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
You know what a B-17 looks like. Four radial engines. The towering tail fin. Glass nose. Heavy-bomber Americana, stamped onto a thousand black-and-white photographs of the daylight raids over Germany. Now picture one with a fifth engine bolted to its nose — a giant...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Three were built. Three flew. One crashed. Two went into storage. None ever entered service. The Lockheed YF-12 is one of those aircraft that should have rewritten the book on continental air defence and instead became a footnote — overshadowed by the SR-71 Blackbird...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On 10 January 1964, a B-52H Stratofortress flown by a Boeing test crew on a structural test flight near East Spanish Peak in southern Colorado when it flew into the worst clear-air turbulence anyone aboard had ever experienced. There was no warning, no cloud cover, no...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On 1 November 1950, UN pilots over North Korea encountered something they had not expected: a swept-wing jet fighter faster, more agile, and better armed than anything in their inventory. The MiG-15 appeared above the Yalu River — the border between North Korea and...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
It was the fastest fighter at low level in the Royal Air Force inventory, faster than the Spitfire below 15,000 feet. It carried four 20mm cannons in its nose — twice the firepower of any other British fighter. It first flew in October 1938 and entered service in...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
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...
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