Aviation World, History & Legends
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 to try it looked...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 less than a year...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 landmarks — bordered...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 staked his...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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, and the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 for the handful of...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 handed the captain...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Picture a man leaning out of an open cockpit in a powder-blue military tunic he designed himself, a waxed moustache curling at the tips, waving to the crowd — and cradling a live lion cub in the crook of his arm. That was Roscoe Turner, and in the 1930s he was...
Aviation World, History & Legends
He had one eye, a sixth-grade education and a criminal record. He was also, by any honest measure, one of the greatest pilots who ever lived. Wiley Post circled the planet alone before most people had ever sat in an aeroplane, built the suit that made high-altitude...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 4 September 1936, a turquoise-and-silver monoplane lifted off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and turned out over the Atlantic, into the dark and into the wind. At the controls, alone, was a 33-year-old woman who had never flown the ocean before....
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