During the Vietnam war, one aircraft suffered the least amount of damage, even though it had been on some 4000 combat sorties, only six of them were lost to enemy action. That aircraft was the F-111 aardvark, a swing wing, medium range multi role combat aircraft which started in service …
Zoom Climbs – The Highest Life and Death Jet Flights to the Edge of Space.
On the 31st of August 1977, Aleksandr Fedotov, flying a modified MiG-25RB with the more powerful Tumansky R-15BF2-300 engine’s, reached the record height of 123,523 feet or 37,649m and that record still stands today. This marked the end Of the Super high altitude zoom climbs, a golden age of altitude …
B-58 Hustler – Was it Really That Bad?
During the early days of the Cold War the U.S needed bombers that would be capable of flying from the US mainland all the way to the Soviet Union, quickly and avoiding enemy air defences by flying higher than the Soviet fighters or missiles could reach. Two bombers emerged that …
How Two Dive Bombers Altered the Course of WW2
The first bombs of WW2 were dropped by Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers, during the invasion of Poland, and the last Luftwaffe ground-assault mission against Soviet tanks took place on the 5th May 1945 as part of the defence of Berlin was also by Stukas dive bombers. This “little Bomber“ …
Was the B29-Superfortress a failure?
It was the single most expensive military project of world war two costing 50% more than the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb and is the only aircraft to drop nuclear weapons in combat. The B-29 was the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of the world war 2 that …
RB.211- The Engine That Sank and Then Saved Rolls Royce
When Rolls Royce went into receivership in 1971, it was like a hammer blow to british industry and was almost as unthinkable as the fall of the monarchy or the Chruch of England, and yet one single project caused more damage than the combined forces Hilter and the Luftwaffe in …
The Wild Weasels – When Electronic Warfare Became Real
They had probably the most dangerous missions in the USAF and were the first into an air attack and the last out and had a greater number of losses during the early part of the Vietnam war for their squadron size than any others. But they developed a technique to …
Concorde’s Overture. Will We Have a New Supersonic Jet Soon? – Boom SuperSonic
1969 was a good year for technological advancements in both aerospace and space. On July 20th 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and promised to open the door to our exploration of not only the moon but also the solar system and just a few months earlier Concorde made …
Lockheed U-2 | Why Is It Still Flying & Still Spying 65 Years On?
We’ve looked at a couple of iconic planes on this channel recently that seem destined to keep flying long past their original design life including the Boeing B-52 and the Lockheed C-5 but there is one more that you would have thought that would have been made redundant long ago …
de Havilland Mosquito – Was It The Most Versatile Aircraft of WW2?
It was both feared and admired by it enemies but when the design for a fast unarmed bomber was proposed to the British air ministry it was met with scepticism and the project was very nearly scrapped before it had started in favour of the existing aircraft of the time. …