Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
It was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday. Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lifted off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on the morning of 17 April 2018, bound for Dallas with 149 people aboard. First Officer Darren Ellisor was flying the leg; in the left seat,...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
It was meant to be one of the shortest, dullest legs in the timetable. At 19:52 on 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 climbed away from London Heathrow bound for Belfast, a Boeing 737-400 with 118 passengers and eight crew aboard. The aircraft was almost...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
On the morning of 27 March 1977, neither KLM Flight 4805 nor Pan Am Flight 1736 was meant to be anywhere near Tenerife. Both Boeing 747s were bound for Gran Canaria when a bomb planted by a separatist group tore through the terminal at Las Palmas. With a warning of a...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
There are aircraft one admires, and there are aircraft one falls a little in love with. The Latécoère 631 belongs firmly to the second category. Conceived in Toulouse, the spiritual home of French aviation, she was the last and grandest of the great...
Monde de l'aviation, Nouvelles
For the crowd gathered at Old Warden on the evening of 15 August, it was meant to be the gentlest of spectacles: vintage aeroplanes flying to a live orchestra as the light softened, the Shuttleworth Collection’s famous “Flying Proms”. Then one of the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
In the 1930s, the most civilised way to cross a continent was aboard a vast, slow, four-engined biplane that looked like it belonged to the age of the Wright Brothers, and travelled at roughly the speed of a modern express train. The Handley Page HP.42 was the...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Some aircraft look powerful. A few look beautiful. The Scaled Composites Proteus looks impossible, a spindly, insect-like machine of twin booms, stalky tandem wings and a slender pod, apparently held together by optimism. It seems far too fragile to fly. And yet this...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Seventy-four years ago today, on 16 August 1952, a large and beautiful British airliner lifted off from Filton for the first time. Passengers who later flew in it swore it was the smoothest, quietest airliner they had ever experienced, so hushed that it earned an...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Before there was a Channel Tunnel, and before roll-on, roll-off ferries could swallow a hundred cars at a time, there was a stranger, more glamorous way to take your car to France: you drove it into the nose of an aeroplane. The aircraft that did the swallowing was...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
For 41 years, the record for the fastest subsonic airliner crossing of the Atlantic belonged not to a Boeing or a Douglas, but to a graceful British jet with four engines bunched at its tail. The Vickers VC10 did London to New York in 5 hours and 1 minute, and nothing...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Look at almost any small jet airliner of the 1960s and 1970s, the Douglas DC-9, the Boeing 727, the BAC One-Eleven, the Fokker F28, and you will see the same clever idea: the engines mounted at the tail, leaving the wing clean and the cabin quiet. That idea did not...
Monde de l'aviation, Histoire et légendes
Imagine boarding a transatlantic flight, settling into your seat, and then, somewhere over the ocean, walking down a spiral staircase to a cocktail lounge for a drink and a hand of cards. That was not a fantasy in 1950. That was a Tuesday aboard the Boeing 377...
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