Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
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…
Picture the scene: a pilot sits in a Level D full-flight simulator, somewhere over a synthetic North Atlantic. The weather is ugly, the aircraft has just thrown an engine failure at the worst possible moment, and every control input, every hesitation, every corrective nudge is being recorded with a precision no human instructor could match…
Walk through the main hangar at RAF Cosford on a quiet Tuesday morning and you will find yourself standing beneath a Vulcan, a Victor, and a Valiant — all three V-bombers, together, under one roof. That is not a sentence you can write about many places on earth. In fact, you can write it about…