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…
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…
Stand at the tail of an MD-11 and look up. That third engine, buried in the base of the vertical stabilizer with its S-duct inlet curving down from the top of the fuselage, is one of the most architecturally striking things in commercial aviation. It looks almost improvised, like someone decided at the last moment…