Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1911, flying across the United States was widely considered impossible. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst put money on it anyway, offering $50,000 to the first pilot to cross the country by air in 30 days or less. The men best equipped...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In May 1930 a 26-year-old typist’s daughter from Hull climbed into a second-hand biplane she had named Jason, pointed it toward the far side of the planet, and set out to fly alone to Australia. Amy Johnson had held a pilot’s licence for...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the spring of 1928 the Pacific Ocean was still, in aviation terms, a blank. No one had ever flown an aircraft across it. The distances were monstrous, the weather unknowable, and the navigation — over thousands of miles of empty water with no...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the evening of 4 October 1930, the largest flying object the world had ever built slipped its mooring mast at Cardington and turned south for India. The R101 was 777 feet long, more than seven storeys tall, and carried a government minister who had...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the summer of 1927, a Hawaiian pineapple magnate offered a fortune to the first aviators who could fly from California to Honolulu — 2,400 miles across the open Pacific. Fifteen crews signed up, tens of thousands of spectators came to watch,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The longest passenger flight ever operated was not a modern jet gliding from Singapore to New York. It was a lumbering World War II flying boat, cruising at 125 mph across a hostile ocean for up to thirty-three hours at a stretch — long enough...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the morning of 7 December 1941, a Pan American Boeing 314 flying boat was two hours out of Auckland, New Zealand, gliding across the South Pacific in luxury — dining lounge, sleeping berths, white-jacketed stewards. Then the radio operator...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL...
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