Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Picture grey water somewhere off the Alaskan coast in April 1924, fog sitting on it like a wet blanket. Four wooden biplanes on pontoons, engines hammering at a frequency that rattles your fillings, wallowing towards a horizon nobody in history has...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story She was small, blonde and twenty-one, and she kept flowers in the cockpit. Not as a joke, not for a photograph — for herself. Somewhere over the churned earth of the Mius Front, in a Yak-1 with a pale lily painted near the nose, Lydia Litvyak...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Stand near an Antonov An-22 as it runs up its engines and you do not just hear it, you feel it. Four of the most powerful turboprop engines ever built spin eight enormous propellers, each blade sweeping a circle taller than a house, and the sound is a...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 21 March 1999, two exhausted men brought a towering silver balloon down onto the Egyptian desert and stepped into the history books. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones had just done what pioneers had tried and failed to do for decades: fly all the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story No engine. No jet fuel. No rocket. Just a slender white sailplane, its long wings feeding on invisible rivers of rising air, climbing higher than a U-2 spy plane into the freezing black of the stratosphere. In 2018, the engineless Perlan 2 glider...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Boeing took its most famous creation, the mighty 747 “Jumbo Jet,” and did something almost sacrilegious: it sawed nearly 50 feet out of the middle. The result was a stubby, oddly proportioned jumbo that looked like a 747 caught in a...
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