Editors' Picks
Area 51: Origins
America’s once-secret air base had humble beginnings.
Need for Speed
Airplanes with a mission: Fly faster.
Beyond the Moon
It’s not a place, exactly. But it could be NASA’s next destination.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Vietnam Memoir
Stories from the war that shaped a generation.
Page 10 of 30
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
In 1928, Elinor Smith, at age 16, became the youngest pilot to earn a license, which was signed by Orville Wright. She made headlines later that year by flying under New York City’s four East River bridges. With Bobbi Trout as co-pilot, they became the first women aviators to refuel an airplane in ...
March 24, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
Or at least play one? Then keep an eye on the casting calls for George Lucas's next film, Red Tails, currently shooting in San Francisco.From a recent announcement:
Beau Bonneau Casting in San Francisco is currently working on a George Lucas Film "Red Tails" starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrance...
March 22, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Former World War II POW, Korean War veteran, and Air Force test pilot Bob White died on March 17, St. Patrick's Day. "The old Irishman went home at 11:55 last night," his son, Greg, wrote in an e-mail to relatives and friends this morning. Major General White retired from the Air Force in 1981 wit...
March 18, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
You’re wandering through the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center when you notice the parachute. An extremely small parachute. This thing couldn’t keep Anne Morrow Lindbergh aloft. So who was it for? Turns out it was made for a lion cub named Gilmore, the pet of air racer and...
March 09, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Space toys can be big business. In 2007, a toy Robby the Robot inspired by the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet was given a retail estimate of $4,500. But that's chump change compared to what Masudaya's Target Robot (right) went for at a recent auction at Dan Morphy—a whopping $52,900.True, the 15-in...
March 05, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
How does it feel to eject from an aircraft going nearly 800 miles per hour?Terrible.But test pilot George Smith managed to survive his harrowing ordeal on this day in 1955, after bailing out of an F-100A diving at Mach 1.05 toward the ocean. As recounted in TIME magazine months later, the 40-g dece...
February 26, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
When Marlon Green wanted a flying job with Continental Airlines more than 50 years ago, the company wouldn't give him the time of day. Now they've named an airplane after him.Green, who died last year at the age of 80, had to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court to get hired as the first Afric...
February 19, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Forty years ago today, Boeing's 747 Jumbo Jet made its commercial debut on Pan American's New York-to-London route.The flight didn't go exactly as advertised. The widebody's 352 passengers and 20 crew members sat on the runway for two hours, waiting to take off from Kennedy Airport, before Captain ...
January 21, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The early history of aviation wasn't just a matter of flying faster and farther, but higher, too. On this day 100 years ago, French aviator Hubert Latham flew an airplane above a kilometer altitude for the first time, breaking his own record by nearly 2,000 feet. He took off in his Antoinette from ...
January 07, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The gunships in the movie Avatar surely were inspired by the Bell Aerospace Textron X-22A of the mid-1960s (below), one of the many iterations of mankind's unquenchable thirst for Vertical-Takeoff-and-Landing machines. Although the tails of Avatar's VTOLS were lifted from the Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospre...
January 05, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
Archaeologists researching the 1911-14 Australian Antarctic Expedition have found pieces of the first airplane ever taken to a polar region. Details are at the project's blog.
January 04, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
ESPN's website has an interesting feature on the origins of the overhead stadium shot—first used in 1960. Or was it in 1959?
January 04, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
On this day in 1910, Theodore "Spuds" Ellyson, a 25-year-old Navy Lieutenant from Richmond, Virginia, was ordered to report to Glenn Curtiss's flying school in San Diego as the first Naval officer assigned to aviation."What was accomplished is now history," Ellyson wrote later, "namely the develop...
December 23, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Neighbors, families, and friends watched the skies for enemy bombers.
July 2011
| By Mark Wolverton
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