Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On 23 May 1943, a German fighter ace named Adolf Galland climbed into an aircraft with no propeller. He opened the throttles, felt a shove of thrust unlike anything a piston engine had ever given him, and afterwards reached for the only words that fit: it was, he...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then vanishing under the...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Il documento più importante nella storia degli aerei stealth non è stato scritto in California o in un aeroporto segreto nel deserto. È stato scritto a Mosca, in russo, da un fisico sovietico, e l'Unione Sovietica lo ha lasciato circolare all'estero perché ha deciso che il lavoro non era di alcuna...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In the history of fighter aircraft, almost nobody remembers the runner-up. The jet that loses the competition gets a museum plaque, if it is lucky, and the winner gets the production line. The Northrop YF-17 Cobra is the great exception. It lost — and then went on to...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
Ci sono aerei enormi, e poi c'era il Mriya. Mettersi sotto un Boeing 747 ti fa sentire piccolo. Mettersi sotto un An-225 fa sembrare piccolo il 747. Per 33 anni è esistito esattamente uno di questi velivoli: un gigante sovietico a sei motori costruito per un unico...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On the afternoon of 26 October 2001, Boeing chairman Phil Condit stood with his Joint Strike Fighter chief, Frank Statkus, in front of a television carrying a live feed from the Pentagon. The largest defence contract in history — one stealth fighter for four armed...
Mondo dell'aviazione, Storia e leggende
In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico Piaggio walked...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
On a May morning in 1957, over the Pacific near Christmas Island, a Vickers Valiant called XD818 opened its bomb bay and released a device that fell away, dropped for long seconds, and then turned the sky white. Britain had just become a thermonuclear power — and it...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
Walk up to the Dornier Do 335 and something looks wrong. There is a propeller on the nose, as expected — and then a second propeller on the tail, spinning behind the fin. The Germans called it the Pfeil, the Arrow. It was the fastest piston-engined fighter the Third...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In March 2026, a silver jet with a wickedly swept wing thundered down a runway near Houston and hauled itself into the Texas sky. It was a North American F-100 Super Sabre — one of only two left flying anywhere on earth — and its return is a good excuse to remember an...
Storia e leggende, Aviazione militare
In the late 1930s, Bell Aircraft set out to build a fighter so ambitious that it needed gunners riding inside the engines. The result, the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda, was sleek, futuristic, bristling with cannon — and one of the most gloriously misguided warplanes the United...
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