Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
On a July morning in 1950, passengers boarding a British European Airways flight from Northolt to Paris found themselves climbing into something unlike anything they’d ever experienced. The aircraft shook the ground with a sound that was neither the grumbling thunder of a piston engine nor the clean shriek of a pure jet. It was…
In October 1934, a KLM Douglas DC-2 named Uiver landed at Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse in the middle of the night, guided down by the headlights of parked cars and the glow of the racetrack floodlights. It had just flown from Amsterdam. The crew finished second in the MacRobertson Air Race — second to a purpose-built…
Picture a flying boat the size of a small apartment building skimming low over San Francisco Bay, its four radial engines shaking the autumn air, a crowd of tens of thousands lining the shore to watch it go. The date is November 22, 1935. The destination is Manila — nearly 8,000 miles away across the…