Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
Find a seat in row 70-something on a main-deck 747 and you know where you are. You’re in an airliner — a wide, humming, slightly impersonal tube with hundreds of strangers and a drinks cart blocking the aisle. Now climb those stairs. The ones just behind the forward door, curving up and slightly aft. Step…
There is a building in Kowloon, somewhere in the dense residential grid east of the old airport, with a red-and-white checkerboard painted on its roof. It’s still there. Long after the last 747 banked over it at a terrifying angle and touched down on a runway that jutted into Victoria Harbour, the checkerboard remains —…
Picture the flight deck of Concorde at rotation. The nose is angled upward at roughly twelve degrees, the afterburners are lit, and the crew is pressing through the sound barrier with an aircraft that looks, from the outside, like it’s trying to swallow the horizon whole. And yet the pilots can see the runway perfectly…