Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
In the summer of 1928, a young social worker from Kansas named Amelia Earhart climbed into a Fokker Trimotor called the Friendship and flew from Newfoundland to Wales. She was, by her own cheerful admission, little more than a passenger on that flight — the real piloting done by Wilmer Stultz, with Lou Gordon riding…
On a warm October morning in 1927, a single-engine Fairchild FC-2 floatplane lifted off from Key West and touched down in Havana roughly an hour later. The distance was barely 90 miles. The payload was a bag of mail. And yet that modest hop, almost laughably unambitious by any modern standard, was the first revenue…
In the summer of 1941, a team of RAF aircrew climbed into a Consolidated B-24 Liberator at Gander, Newfoundland, and pointed its nose east toward Britain. The flight took roughly ten hours. Nobody wrote songs about it. There was no ticker-tape parade. But what those crews were doing — quietly, repeatedly, in stripped-out military transports…