AERO CLONING
NEWS EARLIER this week reported that an American “small commercial aircraft” was forced to make an emergency landing at Ahvaz International Airport, the busiest airport in Iran. Two subtexts are … Continue reading
HENRI COANDĂ’S JET?
DID ROMANIAN Henri Coandă fly the world’s first jet aircraft? Or was it a ducted-fan design? Maybe it didn’t fly at all. The answer, at least in part, depends on whether … Continue reading
GABRIEL VOISIN VS THE WRIGHT BROS.
WELCOME TO today’s debate. Its topic, who invented the aeroplane? The Wright Bros. of Dayton, Ohio? Or Gabriel Voisin of Billancourt, Paris, France? In composing the Wright Bros. argument, I used … Continue reading
THE WRIGHT BROS. VS GLENN CURTISS
ON DECEMBER 17, 1903, on the windy sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the world’s first pilot-controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Others before had piloted … Continue reading
TRANSAVIA PL-12 AIRTRUK
ODDITIES OF aviation usually exist in ones and twos. Yet the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk, one of the oddest, had a production run of 118 examples over a 27-year period, 1966 … Continue reading
BERLIN AIRLIFT
AVIATION ATTAINED a high point of humanitarian achievement—and a major victory in the Cold War—with the Berlin Airlift. For almost an entire year, June 26, 1948, to May 16, 1949, more … Continue reading
DOUGLAS WORLD CRUISERS
ONE OF the grandest adventures in aviation occurred in 1924 when a trio of U.S. Army Air Service Douglas World Cruisers became the first aeroplanes to circumnavigate the globe. The … Continue reading
THE LYSANDER
IF JAMES Bond were an aeroplane, he’d be a Westland Lysander: tough, powerful, extremely capable in clandestine operations and resolutely British. I trust as well he’d be confident enough in … Continue reading
CURTISS OX-5
THIS PARTICULAR aircraft engine earns being my all-time favorite not because of its power, but through its engineering evolution, its eventual ubiquity—and its wonderfully bizarre valve gear. The engine is … Continue reading
ST. PETE FLIGHTS, REAL AND VIRTUAL, PART 2
MEANWHILE, ACROSS the Atlantic in another St. Petersburg, a Florida businessman named Percival Elliot Fansler approached aeroplane maker Tom Benoist with an intriguing idea. Tampa Bay separated the cities of … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 