Aviation Guild

A short post on the TU–22M backfire, my favorite Aircraft in the Russian armed forces: The TU-22 was first flown in 1959 and saw extensive use in the Soviet Air Force, and still does today in the Russian Air Force as the TU-22M3. The TU-22M3, varies drastically from the TU-22 that first flew in 1959. The M model first saw combat in 1987 in Afghanistan, since then it has seen fighting throughout the world. The Russian Air Force currently fields 66 of these impressive airplanes. These planes have seen combat…

Photo taken by LIFE Magazine of a U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command B-36 bomber crew wearing cold-weather gear while posing beside their aircraft, somewhere in Alaska, circa 1950s. Behind them is the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, one of the largest bombers ever built, and one of the defining aircraft of the early Cold War. The B-36 belonged to that strange transitional age between the Second World War and the jet age. It was not sleek like the bombers that came after it. It was vast, heavy, and almost absurdly enormous,…

The Boeing Bird of Prey is such a wild aircraft. Built in secret in the 1990s, looked like something straight out of science fiction, and then Boeing just casually revealed it years later like it was nothing. No major production run. No battlefield legend. Just a strange little stealth demonstrator built to test what the future of aircraft design might look like. That is what makes these kinds of aircraft so fascinating to me. Not because they became famous, or because they changed the world overnight, but because they were…