Browsing: Vehicles

A Brief History On June 5, 1829, the British ship, HMS Pickle, a 5 gun schooner, captured an armed slave ship, the Voladora, off the coast of Cuba.  This vessel was not the first British ship named “Pickle,” and in fact, it was the third British Navy ship with that name.  Indeed, there have been 8 Royal Navy ships with that goofy name!  With all the cool and bad ass sounding names you could give a warship, why settle for some goofy name?  Well, there are a bunch of goofy named warships, and here we list 10 of them.  (Our…

A Brief History On May 18, 1958, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter set the world speed record for an airplane by flying 1404.19 mph over a 15 mile course, at the same time becoming the first aircraft ever to hold both the world speed record and the world altitude record at the same time (91,243 feet on May 7, 1958). Digging Deeper An incredible plane in many ways, this little single jet engine powered interceptor went on to a production run of over 2500 planes and served with 15 different countries, until finally retired in 2004 (Italy). Designed as a Mach…

A Brief History On May 15, 1941, the Gloster E.28/39 jet powered fighter prototype made its first flight. This first of the Allied jet powered aircraft would be further developed into the first operational Allied jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. The test aircraft could only make 338 mph, much slower than piston engine propeller driven fighters, but the Meteor was superb for its day when it was introduced in July of 1944, later variants capable of 600 mph. Although with limited combat experience, including no air to air combat (except against V-1 cruise missiles) the Meteor joined the War too…

A Brief History On May 13, 1958, Australian adventurer and master of WTF, Frederick Benjamin “Ben” Carlin completed a most unlikely circumnavigation of the Earth, accomplished over a 10 year period and in an amphibious vehicle, a World War II amphibious version of the American Jeep! Digging Deeper Carlin first attempted a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in his Ford GPA he fittingly named Half-Safe in 1947 (Should he have named it “Less Than Half-Safe?”), but suffered a few failures over the next couple years.  The successful crossing began in 1950, incredibly beyond even the cheeky nature of the attempt…

A Brief History On May 7, 1937, while Europe watched the prelude to World War II develop during the Spanish Civil War, the German “volunteer” Condor Legion was deployed with the Heinkel He-51 biplane fighter, an anachronism already obsolete when it was built. More like a relic of World War I, that is exactly the opposition the He-51 first had in the Nieuport biplane fighters flown by the Spanish Republican Air Force. Digging Deeper Monoplanes and all metal planes were definitely not unknown when the He-51 made its combat debut, but the older fabric covered fuselage and wings, upper and…