Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Ask which fighter the RAF prized most in the last year of the Second World War and most people will say the Spitfire. They would be wrong. The aircraft that its pilots rated above all others — faster on the deck than a Spitfire, deadlier against the V-1, and one...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Everyone remembers Charles Lindbergh. Almost nobody remembers the three men who, a year later, flew the Atlantic the hard way — against the wind, from Europe to America — and nearly died doing it. Their aircraft was called the Bremen, and their forgotten...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Ask anyone to name Britain’s heavy bomber of the Second World War and they will say the Avro Lancaster — the Dam Busters’ mount, the star of every film and airshow flypast. Almost nobody says Handley Page Halifax. Yet the Halifax flew tens of...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Most warplanes are lucky to see one war. The Douglas A-26 Invader saw three — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — the only American bomber ever to do so. Now one of these remarkable survivors has a new home: the Stockton Field Aviation Museum in...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
In August 1944, a young Minnesotan named Ken Dahlberg shot down three German aircraft in a single swirling dogfight, took a bullet through his oil system, and bailed out into the clouds over occupied France. Sheltered by the Resistance and — by one account...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
The biggest aircraft the Axis powers ever built was not a bomber or a transport — it was a flying boat the size of a small ship, hauled into the air on six engines by a company that normally built ocean liners. And when an American fighter pilot finally sank it...
Luftfahrtwelt, Geschichte & Legenden
Imagine buying an airline ticket and being shown not to a seat in the fuselage, but into the wing itself — a little cabin built into the leading edge, with a big curved window giving you the pilot’s own view of the world rushing toward you. That was the...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On 17 May 1935, the man who would later write The Little Prince climbed aboard the largest aircraft on Earth. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Moscow reporting for a French newspaper, was the only foreigner allowed onto the Tupolev ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky” —...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
It looked like a four-poster bed welded out of scaffolding, and it flew by balancing on a column of jet blast. When the Rolls-Royce Thrust Measuring Rig lurched into the air at Hucknall in 1954, it became the first jet-lift aircraft to fly anywhere in the world...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Take a V-1 flying bomb — the pilotless cruise missile that terrorised London in 1944 — and cut a small hole in the fuselage just ahead of the engine. Fit a plywood seat, a single control column, and a handful of basic instruments. Now put a young man...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
Somewhere over Germany in the last winter of the war, four P-51 Mustangs slid in behind a lone, unfamiliar fighter and prepared to pounce. The pilot did not turn to dogfight. He pushed the throttle to the stop, triggered a chemical boost that shoved extra horsepower...
Geschichte & Legenden, Militärische Luftfahrt
On 30 April 1958, a gleaming four-engined jet was rolled out of a hangar in Dresden to great fanfare. It was called the 152, and it was meant to announce East Germany’s arrival as a builder of modern airliners — a socialist answer to the Comet and the...
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