Aviation World, History & Legends
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 way around the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 soared to 76,124 feet...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 funhouse mirror, and it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
By almost every technical measure, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar was the finest airliner of its generation. It could fly an approach and land itself in thick fog when rivals still needed a pilot’s hands. Its ride was smoother, its systems cleverer, its safety...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Look at an old airport photo from the 1970s and you will see it everywhere: a sleek jet with a tall T-tail and three engines clustered around its rear like the fletching on an arrow. This was the Boeing 727, and for a whole generation it was simply what “an...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the morning of 25 October 1999, a small charter jet lifted off from Orlando bound for Dallas. It was an ordinary hop for six ordinary reasons, a golfer, his agents, a course designer, and two pilots, all with places to be. Within minutes, something went quietly and...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in aviation history...
Aviation World, History & Legends
The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of aviation’s starkest...
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