Aviation World, Military Aviation
From the air it looks like a filing system for aeroplanes. Row upon row of them, wingtip to wingtip, laid out across ten square kilometres of Arizona desert in lines so straight they look drawn. Bombers here. Fighters there. Transports over there. Around four thousand...
Aviation World, History & Legends
There are big aircraft, and then there was the Mriya. Stand under a Boeing 747 and you feel small. Stand under an An-225 and the 747 starts to look like the small one. For 33 years exactly one of these machines existed — a six-engined Soviet giant built for a single,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Fifty years ago today — on 1 July 1976 — the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum opened its doors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was a bicentennial gift to a nation that had just landed men on the Moon, won a Space Race, and built an...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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...
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