Aviation World, History & Legends
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 handed the captain...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 the 1930s he was...
Aviation World, History & Legends
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 high-altitude...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On the evening of 4 September 1936, a turquoise-and-silver monoplane lifted off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and turned out over the Atlantic, into the dark and into the wind. At the controls, alone, was a 33-year-old woman who had never flown the ocean before....
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks, and haul them...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat missions at all. He...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air nearly sixty...
Recent Comments