Editors' Picks
What the astronauts really said
Apollo "onboard voice" recordings captured the moon astronauts' conversations -- cussing and all -- when no one else was listening.
Drones for Hire
The newest eyes in the sky are drawing the attention of power companies, conservation groups, and the ACLU.
Five Reasons to Like NASA’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission
So it's not the Moon or Mars. Get over it.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Disaster at Xichang
An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about history’s worst launch accident.
Page 15 of 31
After being shut down due to worries about volcanic ash choking jet engines, air traffic resumed over Europe last week, as seen in this visualization produced by the folks at ITO World.
April 28, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The field of hypersonic flight research is about to get a boost—actually, two boosts. DARPA's Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle, or HTV-2, is due to launch Thursday on a Minotaur rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (after two days of weather delays).The unpowered glider will be r...
April 20, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Solar Impulse, the prototype of an airplane meant to fly around the world powered only by sunlight in 2012, made its maiden flight from Payerne, Switzerland yesterday. According to flight test leader (and former astronaut) Claude Nicollier, “We reached all objectives, especially the safe landing, w...
April 08, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The yellow broadsheet, published three times a month out of Crossville, Tennessee, is the go-to paper for all things aircraft. Warning: can be habit-forming. It's like picking up a map: you get blissfully lost in the details. Here's a sample of the latest classifieds.Under Help Wanted:"Need 1 g...
March 29, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
Green America's February 2010 report, What Goes Up Must Come Down: The Sorry State of Recycling in the Airline Industry, takes the study of garbage to new heights. It seems that the average passenger generates 1.3 pounds of refuse per flight, which doesn't sound like a lot, until you consider that ...
March 26, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Hey, if James Cameron can do it, so can we. What better subject to view in three dimensions than an airshow? So we asked our friends at LightSpeedMedia to capture airshow scenes with the 3D camera they’ve developed. Then we asked Vision III Imagery to process the photographs so you can see them in 3D without wearing special glasses.
Vision III’s process creates the illusion of depth by digitally combining the stereoscopic images and rapidly switching back and forth between them. Too much jiggle? Hit the off button. The airplanes are also cool in two dimensions.
March 16, 2010
| By airspacemag.com
Crashing test dummies into walls must not be enough fun for some people, so the engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center have upped the ante. These stoic mannequins were strapped inside an MD-500 helicopter last week and dropped from a height of 35 feet to test whether a honeycomb cushion shock ...
March 17, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Okay, I date myself to the 80s with that one. But those of us born prior to the last two decades will remember the verbal welcome that Norm Peterson received each time he entered the bar, Cheers, on the TV show of the same name.Well, Norm Augustine gets almost that welcome wherever he shows up. On ...
March 16, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
You know how to tell a Viper from a Hornet, but does your airshow-newbie friend? Here are recognition tips, bite-size histories, specs and info links for the airplanes most likely to appear at airshows this year.
April 01, 2012
| By airspacemag.com
You don't normally see a DC-3 from this angle. Good thing, too.
May 01, 2010
| By The Editors
The United States Parachute Association has released the good news that 2009 marked the lowest skydiving fatality rate for one year in almost half a century: 16 deaths in nearly three million jumps by over 32,000 USPA members at 220 drop zones across the U.S. Of those three million, 400,000 were by...
February 12, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
Last week, Air New Zealand announced in breathless language that they had finally solved the problem of sleeping in economy class. "Air New Zealand will transform international air travel later this year when it introduces revolutionary, Kiwi-designed lie-flat economy" seats, read a company press r...
February 03, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
There aren’t many companies that can make an airliner fit for a king.
March 2010
| By Roger A. Mola
Would a fighter pilot shoot down a private airplane?
March 2010
| By Craig Mellow
So warns Pride Aircraft in its advertisement offering a pair of Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker Cs for sale. No "aircraft dreamers," either. So you'll have to be content to just read it and weep, or drool, but please, not on your moisture-adverse keyboard. Pride, which restores and sells what you might call "...
January 20, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The aviation community has responded to the Haiti earthquake with tremendous resolve, so much so that the National Business Aviation Association and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association have established on their Web sites ongoing advisories on how pilots and aircraft owners can best serve the...
January 15, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet wrote Shakespeare in 1594, but he wasn’t naming airlines, was he? Coming up with a catchy company name is hard, but it’s not that hard. The name can convey the romance of early air travel, much like “Pan American World Airways,” or “Trans World Airline...
January 06, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
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