Share this story In May 1930 a 26-year-old typist’s daughter from Hull climbed into a second-hand biplane she had named Jason, pointed it toward the far side of the planet, and set out to fly alone to Australia. Amy Johnson had held a pilot’s licence for...
Partagez cette histoire. Au printemps 1928, l'océan Pacifique était encore, en matière d'aviation, une zone vierge. Personne n'y avait encore fait voler un avion. Les distances étaient colossales, la météo imprévisible et la navigation – au-dessus de milliers de kilomètres d'eau déserte sans aucun repère….
Share this story On the evening of 4 October 1930, the largest flying object the world had ever built slipped its mooring mast at Cardington and turned south for India. The R101 was 777 feet long, more than seven storeys tall, and carried a government minister who had...
Share this story In the summer of 1927, a Hawaiian pineapple magnate offered a fortune to the first aviators who could fly from California to Honolulu — 2,400 miles across the open Pacific. Fifteen crews signed up, tens of thousands of spectators came to watch,...
Share this story The longest passenger flight ever operated was not a modern jet gliding from Singapore to New York. It was a lumbering World War II flying boat, cruising at 125 mph across a hostile ocean for up to thirty-three hours at a stretch — long enough...
Share this story On the morning of 7 December 1941, a Pan American Boeing 314 flying boat was two hours out of Auckland, New Zealand, gliding across the South Pacific in luxury — dining lounge, sleeping berths, white-jacketed stewards. Then the radio operator...
Share this story An airliner is steered by its hydraulics. They move the ailerons, the elevators, the rudder — every control surface the pilots touch. Take away all of it and, in theory, the aircraft becomes an unsteerable projectile. On 22 November 2003, a DHL...
Share this story Picture a man leaning out of an open cockpit in a powder-blue military tunic he designed himself, a waxed moustache curling at the tips, waving to the crowd — and cradling a live lion cub in the crook of his arm. That was Roscoe Turner, and in...
Share this story Grumman set out to build the finest carrier fighter of the Second World War: a twin-engine brute that could outrun and outgun anything in the sky and haul a bomber’s worth of ordnance off a flight deck. It succeeded. The Tigercat was...
Share this story Somewhere under the muddy shallows of Wassaw Sound, off the coast of Georgia, sits a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb. The United States Air Force dropped it there in 1958, searched for ten weeks, gave up, and has left it alone ever since. It is one of a...
Share this story Shortly after 11 a.m. on 16 August 1942, a sagging, half-deflated US Navy blimp came drifting low over the rooftops of Daly City, California, snagging telephone wires as a crowd chased it through the streets. It finally sank onto the pavement in front...
Share this story He had one eye, a sixth-grade education and a criminal record. He was also, by any honest measure, one of the greatest pilots who ever lived. Wiley Post circled the planet alone before most people had ever sat in an aeroplane, built the suit that made...
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