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
Aviation & Spaceflight
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
Samuel Pierpont Langley: Aviation Pioneer
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.
