Share this story The aircraft is the size of a Cessna 172 but flies itself. There is no pilot. There is no cockpit. There is no second seat for an emergency manual override. Pyka’s Pelican Cargo just took off, flew a 200-kilometre route over central California,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On December 14, 1986, a strange-looking aircraft — long, thin, with two fuselages, a pusher engine, a puller engine, and wings so flexible they bent visibly under their own weight — rolled down a runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California and lifted off. It was...
At 10:56 PM Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong placed his left boot on the surface of the Moon and said words that 600 million people — one in five people alive on Earth — were listening to live. The signal took 1.26 seconds to travel from the lunar surface...
In 1965, Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe phoned Boeing president Bill Allen and asked whether Boeing could build an aircraft twice the size of anything currently flying. Allen said he would look into it. The two men then did something remarkable for...
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