Aviation and Military History
In the period after World War II, the USSR rapidly emerged as the only power on Earth capable of challenging the USA militarily, and as wartime relations cooled toward the ‘Cold War’ situation which dominated global affairs between 1947 and 1989, the USA came to rely on nuclear (and later thermonuclear bombing) as its primary …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut: The McDonnell F-85 Goblin”
For the Canadian aviation industry, and for Avro Canada in particular, the traumatic story of the CF-105 Arrow was paralleled by that of the contemporary British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2 in the UK. Both of these formidable warplane types were destroyed before entering production by inflexible policies formulated by politicians who, in 1957, were convinced that …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut – the Avro Canada CF-105”
One of the small number of companies which expressed some interest in the British preliminary Specification F.124D for a rocket-powered interceptor was Saunders-Roe Ltd, which opted to prepare the design of a mixed-power fighter to Specification F.138D. Unlike the Avro Type 720, the SR.53, designed by Maurice Joseph Brennan, was of orthodox construction and employed …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut: the Saunders-Roe SR.53”
Succeeding the turbojet-powered Raduga KS-1 Komet and K-10S (AS-1 ‘Kennel’ and AS-2 ‘Kipper’) subsonic and supersonic missiles in the stand-off role against major surface forces, especially those centred on an aircraft carrier, the Raduga Kh-22 is known to NATO as the AS-4 ‘Kitchen’. This substantial long-range missile is still in service, and in an air-launched …
Where the first US stand-off nuclear missile to reach operational status, the Bell GAM-63 Rascal, was a rocket-powered weapon of typical ‘missile’ configuration, an early Soviet counterpart was of turbojet-powered aeroplane layout. This was the Raduga Kh-20 which, in the absence of firm intelligence data about its real designation, received the NATO reporting designation/name AS-3 …
Continue reading “Soviet nuclear stand-off missile – the Raduga Kh-20”
The North American AGM-28 Hound Dog was an air-launched stand-off missile developed from the late 1950s, and was created primarily to attack Soviet ground-based air defence installations and thereby open the way for Boeing B-52 Stratofortress manned bombers to attack the USSR. The missile was allocated the initial designation B-77, then GAM-77 and finally AGM-28. …
Continuation of the history of the development of the main battle tanks leading up to the early days of the Cold War, including the introduction of the T-54 and T-55 by the USSR, and the M47 Patton by the USA.
In the asymmetrical battlefield environment of the future, will combat and close support aircraft draw from aircraft from a simpler time?