Aviation Eras
Periods of innovation in the history of aviation from early flight to the modern age
"No tire-kickers"
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
"How Can We Help?"
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
The Luftwaffe’s Flying Wing
The Horten Ho 229 is on the short list for restoration at the Air and Space Museum.
January 11, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
"Latham Flies Into Clouds"
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
What's In a Name?
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
Going Forward in James Cameron's Wayback Machine
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
An Airplane in Antarctica in 1914
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
The First Overhead Blimp Shot
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
Soviet Star Wars
The launch that saved the world from orbiting laser battle stations.
January 2010 |
By Dwayne A. Day and Robert G. Kennedy III
The Do-Everything Bomber
With its bid to replace the Convair B-36 bomber, did Douglas promise too much?
January 2010 |
By John Aldaz and Sir George Cox
Ode on a Canadian Warbird
The author remembers childhood, with round engines.
January 2010 |
By Bruce McCall
Legends of Vietnam: Super Tweet
Yeah. The A-37 was small. So was Napoleon.
January 2010 |
By Stephen Joiner
The Big Race of 1910
How the first U.S. air race launched an aviation tradition.
January 2010 |
By Don Berliner
Restoration: Kentucky Panther
Grumman's first jet honors a son of the Bluegrass State.
January 2010 |
By Barrett Tillman
Slim and Bud
Meet Charles Lindbergh the barnstormer—as he interviews his oldest flying buddy.
January 2010 |
By Giacinta Bradley Koontz
Space Shuttle Jr.
After 2010, the only spaceplane in the U.S. inventory will be the Air Force's mysterious X-37.
January 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
A & S Interview: Yang Guoxiang
One of China's top test pilots recalls the H-Bomb that almost backfired.
January 2010 |
By Bob Bergin
Plane Art
In late 2001, as a cost-cutting measure, Delta Air Lines decided to replace its first-class linen tray cloths with paper placemats. As flight attendant Jewel Van Valin told the Los Angeles Times in July 2008, the first time she set down a paper mat, a disgruntled passenger “stared at it and then ro...
December 29, 2009 |
By Rebecca Maksel
Boeing's Christmas Tradition
Frequent contributor Stephen Joiner writes: “The 737 runway overshoot in Jamaica on December 8 reminds me of our Boeing Aircraft On Ground article (“Airliner Repair 24/7,” Oct./Nov. 2008), where Boeing’s Jim Testin told me gravely, “Something will ALWAYS happen on Christmas eve” (and then it did.) ...
December 25, 2009 |
By Pat Trenner
