Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And with that...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1936, American Airlines president C.R. Smith made an audacious request to Donald Douglas: build an airliner that could carry passengers across America in 16 hours and make money doing it. The result was the Douglas DC-3 — an aircraft so well-designed that it...
Aviation World, History & Legends
He failed five times. Each time, he climbed into a capsule smaller than a garden shed, was lifted to 35,000 feet by a balloon the size of a 14-storey building, and tried to navigate the unpredictable jet streams around the entire planet. Each time, weather, equipment...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On New Year’s Day 1914, a crowd gathered on the waterfront in St. Petersburg, Florida, to watch history. A Benoist XIV flying boat — a wood-and-canvas biplane with a pusher propeller and a hull designed to land on water — taxied out across Tampa Bay. In the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 2 May 1952, a British Overseas Airways Corporation de Havilland Comet lifted off from London Heathrow and flew to Johannesburg. It carried 36 passengers in pressurised comfort at 35,000 feet, cruising at 500 mph — twice the speed of any existing airliner. The jet...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1921, no flight school in the United States would take her. Not because she lacked ability — she hadn’t been given the chance to prove it. They turned her away because she was Black, and because she was a woman. So Bessie Coleman learned French, saved her...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the morning of October 19, 1901, a small, open gondola suspended beneath a cigar-shaped hydrogen balloon rounded the Eiffel Tower at low altitude, straightened out over the Seine, and docked at the Saint-Cloud aerodrome in a time of 29 minutes and 30 seconds. The...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On July 26, 2016, a strange, slow, silent aircraft landed at Abu Dhabi International Airport, completing a journey that had begun 16 months earlier at the same airfield. Solar Impulse 2 had just circumnavigated the Earth — crossing Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On October 4, 2004 — the 47th anniversary of Sputnik — a small, white aircraft climbed to 112 kilometres above the Mojave Desert, briefly reached space, and returned safely to Earth. It was the third such flight in five days. The pilot was different each time but the...
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