Korean War Figures
Jesse L. Brown: The U.S. Navy’s First Black Aviator
The son of a sharecropper, Mississippi-born Jesse Leeroy Brown would do whatever it took to become a pilot and break the navy's color barrier
Mag: Aviation History Personalities
Hans-Ulrich Rudel: Eagle of the Eastern Front
Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Germany’s most highly decorated combat pilot, only shot down nine enemy aircraft, but he destroyed the equivalent of more than three Soviet tank corps
Mag: Aviation History Hero
Forgotten Casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis
How the shootdown of a U-2 spyplane over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile nearly led to nuclear war
Vietnam War
An Air Force Pilot Flies Navy
Ron Williams remembers his temporary duty assignment flying douglas A-3B “Whales” from a carrier as the most challenging two years of his career
Wild West
The Man Who Almost Beat the Wrights Into the Air
More than 100 years ago, Samuel Langley's team of specialists from the Smithsonian Institution proved to a small group of astonished observers that powered flight was possible. But they still had to prove that their Aerodrome could safely carry a man into the sky.
