Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 10 June 1965, a British airliner full of fare-paying passengers came down the approach to a runway and landed without either pilot touching the controls. It was the first automatic landing by a civil airliner in scheduled passenger service, and it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 4:17 in the afternoon on 4 April 1977, a first officer named Lyman Keele said nine words into a cockpit voice recorder that would be played back for decades afterwards. “Bill, you’ve got to find me a highway.” His DC-9 had no...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 3:48 in the afternoon on 20 October 1986, two minutes from touchdown at Kuibyshev, the captain of a Soviet airliner asked his flight engineer to pull the curtains across the cockpit windows. The Tupolev Tu-134 had them fitted for training: draw...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On a spring morning at Bordeaux-Mérignac in 1971, a sleek twin-jet lifted off carrying the hopes of the French aircraft industry. Marcel Dassault had built fighters that governments queued up for. Now he was going after Boeing, on...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Share this story Stand behind a jet at full power and the experience is less like hearing a machine than being shoved by one. A modern airliner engine can produce more than 100,000 pounds of thrust from a device with essentially no reciprocating parts — just a...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Share this story Kelly Johnson gave the Skunk Works the SR-71 and the U-2. But it was his successor, a chubby, wisecracking thermodynamicist named Ben Rich, who took an idea most engineers thought was absurd — an aircraft you couldn’t see on radar —...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the early 1950s, neutral Sweden set out to build a supersonic interceptor unlike anything else in the world — a fighter with a strange, folded ‘double-delta’ wing. It was such a radical idea that no one could be sure the shape...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Before he was a reclusive billionaire, before the movies and the mania, Howard Hughes was a young man obsessed with going fast. In 1935 that obsession took the shape of a single, gorgeous silver aeroplane — the Hughes H-1 Racer — and with...
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