Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In the mid-1980s, Beechcraft decided to leap a generation ahead of everyone else. It teamed up with Burt Rutan, the most imaginative aircraft designer alive, and built a business aeroplane that looked like it had flown in from the next century: an all-carbon-fibre...
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