Aviation History

On a hot August day 50 years ago, I was deposited in front of the Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport in a rented Cadillac. The Caddy needed some timing work done on the engine, and the ambient temperature had outpaced the vehicle’s air conditioning, but I didn’t care. I was flying to London […]

As I write this, there were 1,729,694,062 websites (and counting) on the internet. While the World Wide Web can be a helpful place most of us cannot live without, many of those sites are useless fodder of little use to anyone. However, once in a while, we stumble upon a simply wonderful site, a site […]

The triennial meeting of the global aviation agency ICAO is taking place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on September 24 through October 4, 2019, and it has been punctuated so far with protests on climate change—while at the same time maintaining its focus on global priorities to address aviation safety, air navigation capability and efficiency, security, […]

The Boeing Blue Sky Aviation Gallery at Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum at Centennial Airport in Englewood, Colorado was a “breathtaking” venue for the National Aviation Hall of Fame (NAHF) to present their Enshrinement of the “Class of 2019” Inductees. Among the inductees at the 57th annual dinner and induction ceremony were […]

“When the kids came over in 1944, they didn’t have GPS…they didn’t have 500 hours of time in the cockpit between them,” says Doug Rozendaal, pilot of That’s All Brother, a Douglas C-47 joining the 2019 D-Day Squadron in an epic trip across the Atlantic Ocean this week. He considers his crew very fortunate: Not […]

A piece of aviation history was lost yesterday as the last of four 1/3-scale prototypes built during the development of the Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing bomber, the N9MB, crashed in a prison yard in Norco, California. The Flying Wing has been maintained and operated for many years by the Planes of Fame Air Museum in […]

The second episode of a new PBS series, “Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World,” premieres tomorrow night April 24 with “Airplane,” a look at the people who inspired the Wright Brothers to create the first practical aircraft. The journey to the first successful flight is a story full of passion, danger and death, and […]

Thirteen people survived the crash of a vintage C-47 military transport plane on Saturday at Burnet Airport, 20 miles northwest of Austin, Texas. The aircraft, the Bluebonnet Belle owned by the Commemorative Air Force, was departing for AirVenture 2018 in Oshkosh when the accident occurred during takeoff. The aircraft banked right on takeoff, before turning […]