15 interesting facts about aviation

Here are some interesting facts about aviation listed by a user on Quora:

1. During WWII, Russian fighter pilot T. Kuznetsov flew himself home after being shot down by stealing a Nazi fighter plane. The German pilot landed near his crash site to scrounge around the wreck to look for souvenirs.

2. During WWII, during parachuting from a damaged bomber, an American aviator downed a Japanese fighter plane by shooting the pilot in the head with his sidearm.
3. The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft was so fast that the designers didn’t even consider evasive maneuvers. The pilot was instructed to accelerate and out-fly any threat, including missiles.

4. In 1970 Russian MiG-25 Fighter had the majority of its avionic implemented in vacuum tubes to resist nuclear electromagnetic pulse.

5. Every last F-14 Tomcat America has in flyable storage is being shredded to prevent spares from reaching Iran, who are still flying the one sold to them by the U.S. in the 70s.

6. In 1983, an Israeli pilot successfully landed an F-15 with only one wing. He didn’t realize the extent of the damage until after landing and stated he would have ejected had he known.

7. A McDonnell Douglas F-15 once shot down a satellite.

8. Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound received his feat on October 14th, 2012 in an F-15 Eagle, to celebrate the 65th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier. He was 89 years old.
9. The F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon have been pitted against each other in mock dogfights in the past. The Typhoons proved to be surprisingly effective against American Aircraft and after such an encounter the USAF declared “they didn’t want to play anymore” as a result.

10. During WWII, a single American P-51 fighter plane held off 30 German fighters from attacking a squadron of B-17 bombers for over half an hour.

11. In June 1974, while President Nixon was on his way to a scheduled stop in Siria, Syrian fighter jets intercepted Air Force One to act as escorts. However, the Air Force One crew was not informed in advance, and as a result, took evasive action including a dive.
12. The test pilot for America’s first jet fighter dressed in a disguise, so that if trainees at a nearby base saw this new “propeller-less” plane, they would be more likely to think they were hallucinating if it was being flown by a gorilla wearing a derby and smoking a cigar.
13. In 1956 due to high speed, an F-11 fighter shot itself because it was faster than its own bullet.

14. The effective cost of the F-35 Program alone is nearly 7 times the total cost of the International Space Station.
15. During WWII, Royal Air Force fighter pilots started a rumor that excessive carrot consumption gave gunners night vision. They did this so as not to alert Germans of RAF’s new radar technology after they shot down a German aircraft on night raids and the German believed it. German fighters then started eating large quantities of carrots.