History & Legends, Military Aviation
Max Conrad was 56 years old when he flew a single-engine Piper Comanche from Casablanca to Los Angeles in 1959, becoming the first person to make a solo transatlantic crossing in a light aircraft. He had stripped out every non-essential item from the Comanche to fit...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The number is so large it seems invented. Four hundred and eighty-seven. That is how many different types of aircraft Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown flew during his lifetime — a record that stands to this day and will almost certainly never be broken. For...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1924, a 25-year-old barnstormer from Wisconsin arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska, in a World War I surplus Hisso Standard J1 biplane with an open cockpit. The ground temperature was -40°F in winter. The nearest mechanic was hundreds of miles away. Instrument flying, as...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Bill Allen, Boeing’s president, was watching the hydroplane races on Lake Washington from a company yacht on 7 August 1955. The new Boeing 367-80 — the prototype of what would become the 707 — was scheduled to fly overhead in a demonstration for potential airline...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 1 August 1955, Tony LeVier lifted a strange new Lockheed aircraft off a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The aircraft had impossibly long, narrow wings — like a powered glider — and was powered by a single jet engine. It climbed like nothing he had ever flown,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The routine was impossible. Bob Hoover would take off in his Rockwell Shrike Commander — a twin-engine business aircraft, not an aerobatic plane — climb to altitude, and shut both engines off. Then, on nothing but momentum and gravity, he would loop, roll, fly...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 13 September 1935, Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of a sleek silver racer of his own design and flew it at 352.46 mph across a measured course in Santa Ana, California — faster than any aeroplane in history had ever flown. He was 29 years old, had already...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The admirals were convinced it was impossible. You simply could not sink a battleship from the air. Battleships were armoured fortresses, built to absorb punishment from naval guns. Bombs dropped from altitude, they argued, would never hit anything. General Billy...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 11 July 1949, a seaplane carrying Jacqueline Auriol — daughter-in-law of the French President — crashed on the Seine near Paris. She was pulled from the wreckage with catastrophic facial injuries. Surgeons rebuilt her face through 22 separate operations over two...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
She landed in a farmer’s field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. “From America,” she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a...
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