Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
Walk through the main entrance at Udvar-Házy and the first thing that happens is your brain simply refuses to process the scale. The Boeing Aviation Hangar is enormous — not airport-terminal enormous, but cathedral enormous, the kind of space that makes a full-size Concorde look almost modest. And there, right in the middle of it…
Picture Charles Lindbergh somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic, thirty-something hours into his flight, fighting sleep with his bare hands. He’s prying his eyelids open. He’s sticking his face into the slipstream through the side window just to feel the cold air bite. Beneath him: nothing but ocean. Ahead: an entire continent holding its…
Stand at a gate and watch a Boeing 777X taxi in, and there’s a moment — easy to miss if you’re not looking for it — where the outer sections of those enormous wings begin to rotate upward. Six feet of wingtip, folding like a bird settling its feathers. It happens slowly, almost casually, and…