Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1965, Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe phoned Boeing president Bill Allen and asked whether Boeing could build an aircraft twice the size of anything currently flying. Allen said he would look into it. The two men then did something remarkable for...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the summer of 1940, roughly 3,000 RAF fighter pilots stood between Nazi Germany and the conquest of Britain. Against them, the Luftwaffe fielded over 2,600 aircraft and some of the most experienced combat aviators in the world. For four months — from July to...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On October 24, 2003, British Airways flight BA002 touched down at London Heathrow for the last time. As it taxied in, the crew made an announcement: this was Concorde’s final commercial flight. The passengers — who had each paid around £8,000 for a seat — stood...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The standard defensive manoeuvre for an SR-71 Blackbird when it detected a surface-to-air missile launch was simple: accelerate. At Mach 3.3 and 85,000 feet, acceleration was sufficient. No SR-71 was ever shot down. In over 3,500 operational missions, spanning 24...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the evening of October 12, 1947, test pilot Chuck Yeager went horse riding in the Mojave Desert and fell off, breaking two ribs. Two days later, in severe pain and with his ribs tightly taped, he crawled into the cockpit of a Bell X-1 rocket plane, used a sawed-off...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At dawn on August 27, 1939 — four days before Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began — test pilot Erich Warsitz climbed into a small, unremarkable-looking aircraft at the Heinkel airfield in Rostock-Marienehe and opened a throttle connected to an engine...
Aviation World, History & Legends
At 7:25 PM on May 6, 1937, the German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg — 804 feet long, the largest aircraft ever built — caught fire while attempting to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. In 34 seconds, the largest flying object in history was a wreck on the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island — a two-mile-long coral strip in the central Pacific, 2,556 miles away. They were on the longest and most dangerous leg of an around-the-world flight....
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of May 21, 1927, a single-engine monoplane appeared out of the darkness over Le Bourget airfield near Paris. The crowd waiting on the ground numbered 150,000 people — the largest gathering in French history to that point. When Charles Lindbergh stepped...
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