The F-14 fighter, one of the most well known fighter aircraft of the 1970s and 80s Cold War period, was also the last major analogue fighter to be made by the US and building upon the experience gained in Vietnam from the use of F4 phantoms and its direct predecessor …
The Rise & Fall of the Harrier Jump Jet
In December 2010, The British Royal Air Force and Royal Navy announced they would retire their Harrier jump jets from operational flights before 2011, in what had been two-month rush job to meet the demands of government cuts due to the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008. This marked …
Why Aren’t Swing Wing Aircraft Made Any More?
From around the mid 1960s, a new type of aircraft led the way in introducing new multi role fighters and bombers both in the United States and in the Soviet Union and then Europe. This hybrid style of aircraft looked to combine the low-speed flexibility and efficient cruise of straight-wing …
F-111 Aardvark, The Aircraft that Defined an Era
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 …