Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The trick she was best known for went like this: fly a biplane upside down, ten feet off the grass, and cut a ribbon strung between two poles with the propeller. The poles were held by Steve Wittman and Bill Brennan. On the first attempt the engine...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The aeroplane was eleven years old and had been sitting around for a decade racking up about 990 hours under a string of previous owners. It was a 1953 Cessna 180 — a single-engine, tailwheel, four-seat lightplane of the sort that fills small-town...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twelve years on, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard is still missing. Not missing in the sense that nobody knows exactly where the wreck lies — missing in the sense that the largest and most expensive underwater search in history has now...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story At 11:24 on the morning of 14 August 2005, a Greek Air Force F-16 pilot pulled alongside a Boeing 737 orbiting quietly over the Aegean and looked into the cockpit. The first officer was slumped motionless in his seat. The captain’s seat was...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twelve minutes after leaving Tokyo on the evening of 12 August 1985, the rear pressure bulkhead of a Boeing 747 gave way. The escaping air blew off most of the vertical stabiliser and severed all four hydraulic systems. The crew were left with an...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Two minutes and thirty-three seconds passed between the moment an Airbus A310 stopped doing what its crew believed it was doing, and the moment it hit a hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau. Seventy-five people died. The story is usually told as a simple...
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