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 9 of 30
On November 15, 2010, Bonhams & Butterfields in San Francisco will auction this dark grey-green canvas fuselage insignia panel from a Spad VII flown by the Lafayette Escadrille, featuring the familiar Indian-head insignia. The panel, says the company's press release, was collected by Sergeant E...
November 03, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
On September 28, 1924, crowds cheered and sirens shrieked as the Army Service pilots known as "the Magellans of the Air" landed at Sand Point Field in Seattle, Washington, after completing the first round-the-world flight.They had set off on April 6, some six months earlier, determined to circumnav...
October 21, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
As prizes go, this was a big one. In 1901, French oil tycoon and aviation patron Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe put up 100,000 francs (equivalent to more than $500,000 today) for the first airman who could fly a 7-mile circuit starting from a park in Paris, rounding the Eiffel Tower, then returning to...
October 19, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
In September 1870, not long after the start of the Franco-Prussian War, the city of Paris was under siege by Prussian soldiers. By the 19th, the German army had blocked all communication into or out of the city. There was nothing worse, wrote French journalist Francisque Sarcey, than to "live cut o...
October 13, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Alex Spencer, curator of British aircraft and military flight materiél at the National Air and Space Museum, started his career some 20 years ago as a lowly intern. One morning, as he was riding the shuttle out to the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryl...
October 04, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
It wasn't the most dramatic flight of 1910, but it left an important legacy. Phil Parmelee, a pilot with the Wright exhibition team, took off from Dayton, Ohio, with 200 pounds of silk loaded into his Wright B Flyer, to be delivered to a merchant in Columbus. Dry goods salesman Max Morehouse paid t...
October 01, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
You hear it all the time, even from people who should know better: September 11, 2001 was the only time in history that all air traffic in the United States was halted.Wrong. Sigh.Air & Space researcher Roger Mola was the first to point out that it wasn't the first time. That distinction goes t...
September 10, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
French aviator Adolphe Pégoud ranks as one of the best and bravest pilots in history, and he knew how to wow a crowd. On this day in 1913 he introduced a trick that scared even other pioneers of flight—he flew upside down, for an audience at the Juvisy aerodrome outside Paris.A correspondent descri...
September 01, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
It took 18 years for someone to claim the $100,000 prize offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer for the first sustained (mile-long) human-powered flight. On this day in 1977, the Gossamer Condor, built by Paul MacCready and flown by bicyclist/ hang-glider pilot Bryan Allen, won the challenge...
August 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Just two weeks ago, the Commemorative Air Force returned its B-29 Superfortress, Fifi, to flight after six years of down time while the airplane was fitted with customized engines (maintainers had found metal shavings in the engine oil). The CAF planned to re-launch Fifi as the signature aircraft f...
August 18, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
On May 20, 1932 Amelia Earhart set off in her Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland intending to fly to Paris. Nearly 15 hours later, she landed in Robert Gallagher's cow pasture in Ballyarnott, in Derry, Northern Ireland, instead, thereby becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.Mrs. Gal...
July 12, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Airplanes and The Movies came of age at the same time, and Harriet Quimby—best known as the first American woman to earn a pilot's license—had a keen interest in both. In fact, by the time she fatally crashed her Blériot XI on this day in 1912, there was little the adventure-loving 37-year-old hadn...
July 01, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The two-seat biplane looks somewhat flimsy. Sure, it was cutting-edge in 1909 when the Wrights demonstrated it for the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Meyer. But how would it fare during World War II?Fortunately, the Wright Military Flyer never had to compete in any dogfights. But it did travel from...
June 14, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
To mark this year's 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the Royal Air Force Museum has begun initial planning for a new exhibition building, tentatively called the Battle of Britain Beacon.The 350-foot-tall structure (taller than Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, and the United States Capitol...
June 01, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Attention, turbojet-heads: Turner Classic Movies airs "The Sound Barrier" at 8 p.m. EST Friday, May 7. The 1952 film, directed by David Lean, plays fast and loose with aerodynamics and aviation history, but it offers fine footage of a de Havilland Comet and a Supermarine Swift interceptor, a number...
May 07, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
Dennis Eggert, president of the Minnesota Air & Space Museum, is in desperate need of storage space for a 1911 Steco Aerohydroplane. “God forbid if it comes to calling a trash truck or Dumpster,” he says, “but it’s got to be moved.” The aircraft had been disassembled and stored in various site...
April 28, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
In March 1999, during the Kosovo War, as Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko piloted his F-117, he saw two missiles punch through the bottom of the clouds. The unbelievable had happened: A Serbian surface-to-air missile had locked on to his aircraft. Zelko was able to eject, and was rescued shortly after...
April 19, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
"Dear Mr. Taxman: I'm sorry I missed the deadline. I was, uh, hmm, in a spaceship flying to the moon?"On the evening of April 15, 2010, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's John H. Glenn lecture series honored four legendary men of Apollo 13 on the 40th anniversary of their hair-raising ...
April 16, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
On April 13, Bonhams auction house will offer a 1917 Curtiss MF "Seagull" Flying Boat for sale. The MF (which stands for "Modernised F-boat") was developed in 1917 from the original F model, a design the U.S. Navy had been using since 1912/1913. (The F model was the most successful of the pre-war C...
April 09, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
A makeshift screen hung from a support rig that read “Three Tons.” Dave Morris, a curator from Britain’s Fleet Air Arm Museum, projected on it three slides: Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” a Ming vase, and a Chippendale end table. “What if these were yours?” he asked the audience at the National Ai...
April 05, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
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