Concorde had the throttles set to 100% dry power on take-off and left them there. Reheat (afterburner) was used for 90 seconds on take-off and then for a short while…
Civil
Members of the SR-71 Blackbird crew have reported that on occasion, they came down in search of a tanker, not so much because they were running out of gas but…
The only Eagle to record two MiG-29 kills, F-15C #86-0156, was retired to the US Air Force National Museum on April 25, 2023 As seen in the video in this…
Carriers
When Russian Nuclear Submarine K-314 Rammed USS Kitty Hawk the Americans blamed the Sub Captain for the incident and the Soviets concurred
K-314 Captain Vladimir Evseenko did not agree since the incident had caused no loss of life or the submarine itself. “We even managed to kick out the ‘enemy’ for a…
‘It was thought if the Chance Vought XF8U-3 Super Crusader where to have gone into production it would have been powered by a J58,’ Jim Goodall, former Master Sergeant at…
F-14 Tomcat
F-14A Tomcat Pilot tells the story of the real-life Goose and explains how Nick Bradshaw could have survived the flat spin featured in Top Gun Movie
‘The real RIO was Lt. David J. “Goose” Lortscher. His callsign Goose later became part of the movie,’ John Chesire, former US Navy F-14A Tomcat pilot. We are all familiar…
Airshows
In 2019 Thunderbirds called in 15 former team commanders for brutal and honest input to help improve the Squadron
By the end of 2019, Col. John Caldwell, Thunderbird’s commander, and No. 1 pilot called in 15 former Thunderbirds for their brutal and honest input on the team since there…
Civil
Former Boeing 737 pilot tells the story of an odd UFO sighting he had in the skies above Los Angeles
‘Those bright lights we thought were from an aircraft on approach suddenly and almost instantaneously moved horizontally across the night sky by maybe 35 to 40 degrees and at a…
‘We had been conducting operations at low level (200–300 feet) in the Norwegian Sea when we received a message over our broadcast that Bears would be transiting our area from…
“In military power, we would start to fall off the boom. The solution was to light one afterburner with careful finesse,’ Brian Shul, former SR-71 Blackbird pilot The Lockheed A-12…