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The Last Rocket Pilot
The last human footprints on the moon were left by Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt in December 1972. Had things worked out as originally planned, however, those last prints would have been...
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Germany’s Sea Eagle
In late 1916 a German naval adventurer slipped the British blockade aboard a three-masted windjammer to raid like the pirates of old The golden age of fighting sail lasted more than 300 years, from the...
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‘Board Her Boys!’: The 1804 Burning of USS Philadelphia
When the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, it set into motion events not considered by the nascent nation’s Founding Fathers. Among the unintended consequences...
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It Was the Most Powerful Engine Ever Created. Rocketdyne Engineers Just Had...
.image-13784144 { max-height: 100%; --left: 49.75%; --top: 22.41%; } One of the defining images of the 20th century is of Apollo 11 ascending on a pillar of incandescent fire from Pad 39A at Kennedy...
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Thunder in the Cinema: Hollywood’s Jet Age Movies
In the mid- to late 1940s the drone and roar of aircraft piston engines faded and was replaced by the howl and scream of turbojets. Hollywood, in its never-ending search for cutting-edge...
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Operation Spring High: Thuds vs. SAMs
In March 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, intent on preventing North Vietnam from putting its full military might into an invasion of South Vietnam, authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained...
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Frederick M. Trapnell: The Godfather of Naval Aviation
.image-13750154 { max-height: 100%; --left: 38.29%; --top: 36.83%; } Today every U.S. naval aviator who straps into an aircraft cockpit owes a debt to a man they never met and few have even heard of,...
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Northrop’s Radical Flying Wing Bomber of the 1940s
.image-13753396 { max-height: 100%; --left: 49.90%; --top: 51.46%; } More than 70 years after the first Northrop YB-49 flying wing prototype took to the skies over Muroc Army Air Base in the Mojave...
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Operation Tidal Wave: What Went Wrong With the US Attack on Romania in WWII?
.image-13732477 { max-height: 100%; --left: 63.64%; --top: 33.62%; } The events in the skies over the Mediterranean and southern Europe on August 1, 1943, have long been a historical bone of...
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T Square 45: A B-29 Bomber Returns to its Former Glory
.image-13758771 { max-height: 100%; --left: 49.46%; --top: 46.20%; } The Seattle Museum of Flight’s meticulous B-29 restoration has returned most of the veteran bomber’s controls to working order....
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This Forward Air Controller Took Death-Defying Risks to Aid Special Forces
During the Vietnam War, the skies were filled with fast jet fighters, huge bombers, droning transports and thudding helicopters. They were hard to miss. Other aircraft, less noticed but no less...
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Bell X-1: Dropping the Orange Beast That Broke the Sound Barrier
.image-13743881 { max-height: 100%; --left: 49.70%; --top: 60.94%; } The first supersonic flight would not have been possible without the help of countless support personnel, including the man who...
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At Fort Sumter, This Bizarre, Floating Contraption Helped Start the Civil War
Recommended for you At 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861, on James Island in Charleston Harbor, Confederate Lieutenant Henry Farley pulled the lanyard of a siege mortar. A solid thump rocked the ground as a...
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Before CGI, This Director Needed to Build His Own B-25 Fleet
.image-13782049 { max-height: 100%; --left: 50.00%; --top: 19.34%; } For his third film, acclaimed director Mike Nichols decided to adapt “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller’s pitch-black satire of war,...
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What Happened to the B-25s of ‘Catch-22’?
.image-13782175 { max-height: 100%; --left: 50.79%; --top: 43.56%; } Eighteen B-25s flew for “Catch-22.” One was deliberately destroyed during the production. Here’s what happened to all these...
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How White House Interference And Enemy Intelligence Cost American Airmen...
.image-13783530 { max-height: 100%; --left: 50.00%; --top: 42.61%; } On July 24, 1965, four McDonnell F-4C Phantom fighter-bombers of Leopard Flight joined an airstrike against the Dien Bien Phu...
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How a Boer Hunter Tracked an Elusive German Cruiser
.image-13789769 { max-height: 100%; --left: 50.18%; --top: 64.41%; } In the 1976 war film Shout at the Devil, based on the best-selling 1968 novel by Wilbur Smith and starring Lee Marvin and Roger...
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The Turkestan Incident
.image-13794718 { max-height: 100%; --left: 51.92%; --top: 44.64%; } On June 2, 1967, with Wing Commander Colonel Robert Scott away, Colonel Jacksel “Jack” Broughton was serving as acting commander of...
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There Were Reasons Why American Submariners Damned Their Own Torpedoes
Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Randall “Dan” Daspit, captain of the U.S. submarine USS Tinosa (SS-283), was astounded at his luck. Framed in the periscope eyepiece was a 19,250-ton Japanese tanker, and...
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A ‘School of Crime, With Ma Barker Their Teacher’
.image-13795346 { max-height: 100%; --left: 39.84%; --top: 65.90%; } History has long since established FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover abused his position, gathering defamatory information on elected...
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