Showing posts with the label Aviation

The Osoaviakhim-1 Disaster

Mar 13, 2024

Between 1930 and 1932, Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard made more than two dozen trips to the upper atmosphere using a balloon of his design...

John Stringfellow And The World's First Powered Flight

Mar 5, 2024

In 1842, British engineers William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow received a patent for a flying machine. Unlike previous attempts made...

The Leicester Balloon Riot of 1864

Nov 13, 2023

During the latter part of the 18th century and most of the 19th century, there was a notable surge in public fascination with ballooning. Th...

Glacier Girl: The P-38F Lightning That Was Rescued From Beneath The Ice

Sep 13, 2023

During the Second World War, the United States initiated a massive movement of aircrafts and ground troops across the Atlantic and into the ...

The Daredevil Wing Walking Pioneers

Jul 26, 2023

It took less than two decades from the Wright Brothers’ initial modest flight for stunt flying to become a phenomenon. It started after the ...

The Tragic Death of Sophie Blanchard, The First Woman Balloon Pilot

May 30, 2023

Ever since Sophie Blanchard stepped into the basket with her husband, the famous balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, she knew she belonged to ...

Jimmy Doolittle And The First Blind Flight

Apr 27, 2023

People assume that its easier to fly an airplane during the day because we can look out of the window and see where we are going, the same w...

6 Spectacular Survivors of Free Fall

Apr 12, 2023

It is said that a fall from a height of only six feet can be deadly with broken bones, head injuries, spinal cord injuries and even death. B...

St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line: The World’s First Airline

Feb 27, 2023

Barely a decade after the pioneering flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service bega...

Jacques Charles And The First Hydrogen Balloon

Jan 19, 2023

On June 4, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers gave the first public demonstration of a hot-air balloon in southern France. The balloon, made of ...

The Gimli Glider

Dec 8, 2022

The American system of measurement and its units—feet, miles, pounds, and gallons—are quite bizarre. They are random, unintuitive and have n...

The First Aircraft Accident Investigation

Nov 15, 2022

On 13 May 1912, a two-seater aircraft piloted by Edward Victor Beauchamp Fisher crashed at Brooklands, in England, killing both the pilot an...

Albrecht Berblinger: The Flying Tailor of Ulm

Nov 3, 2022

Albrecht Berblinger was an early aviation pioneer who is best known for designing a hang glider, nearly four decades before British inventor...

Vesna Vulovic’s 33,000 Feet Fall

Sep 15, 2022

On January 26, 1972, the JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 flying from Stockholm to Belgrade became the target of a terrorist attack. A suitc...

Alberto Santos-Dumont: The Brazilian Aviation Pioneer

Mar 29, 2022

The Wright brothers are generally considered to be the inventors of flight, but in Brazil, it is their son of the soil Alberto Santos-Dumont...

The First Airmail Was Delivered During The Siege of Paris

Feb 22, 2022

When Prussian forces had Paris under siege during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the beleaguered Parisians had only one hope to get messag...

Juliane Koepcke: The Girl Who Fell From an Airplane And Survived The Rainforest

Jan 25, 2022

Juliane Koepcke was seventeen and desperate to get home. She had just graduated from high school in Lima, and was returning to her home in t...

The Kopp–Etchells Effect

Jan 24, 2022

When American war correspondent and photographer Michael Yon went accompanying US soldiers to Afghanistan in 2009, and began photographing t...

How Air Raids in Britain Led to Shortage of Sausages in Germany

Nov 4, 2021

“It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb,” proclaimed a British Army recruitment poster publicized during W...

Horatio Phillips’s Extreme Multiplanes

Sep 30, 2021

British engineer and aviator Sir George Cayley suggested, as early as 1843, that an airplane with multiple wings will generate more uplift a...