Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
Stand in front of a B-29 Superfortress in the Arizona sun and you’ll feel something shift in your chest. These machines are enormous in photographs. In person, up close, with the heat radiating off the aluminum skin and the shadow of a propeller blade falling across your boots, they become something else entirely. That’s what…
Picture the scene: November 1935, Alameda, California. A giant flying boat sits in the water, its four radial engines ticking over, its hull gleaming. A small crowd watches as the China Clipper lifts off and points its nose west. Nobody aboard knows for certain that they’ll make it. The Pacific Ocean had never been crossed…
Picture the inside of a traditional aluminum airliner fuselage at cruise altitude. The humidity is kept brutally low — somewhere around 5 to 10 percent — because aluminum corrodes. Your skin dries out, your sinuses ache, and by hour ten you feel like you’ve been stored in a jar. That’s not an accident or an…