Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Somebody in the Soviet Ministry of Aircraft Industry decided that what agriculture needed was a jet. Not a jet trainer, not a jet transport. A jet crop-duster. A biplane one. The PZL M-15 Belphegor is the only jet-powered biplane ever put into series...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Junkers G.38 had a wing two metres thick at the root. Junkers, being Junkers, looked at that volume and decided it was a waste to fill it with nothing but structure. So they put passengers in it. On the second aircraft, six people sat inside the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story If you broke the sound barrier, you ate free. That was the standing offer at a bar in the Mojave desert run by a woman who had once held the women’s world air speed record, flown stunts for Howard Hughes, and crossed Mexico on a burro dressed as...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The Pacific is the largest single feature on the planet. In 1928 nobody had flown across it, and the reason was arithmetic: the distances between usable landfalls were longer than any aircraft could reliably manage, and if you missed the island you...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In 1926 an oilfield roughneck in Oklahoma took a metal splinter in his left eye and lost it. Seven years later, the same man flew around the world on his own in under eight days, and then went looking for the edge of the atmosphere. Wiley Post had one...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
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