Elon Musk is no stranger to The Flight Blog. However, amid all of the commotion regarding his involvement in SpaceX, the Hyperloop, Tesla Motors, OpenAI, and the Death Star, we’ve somehow managed to overlook Musk’s subtle plan to change the way we travel by air. Musk has already developed an automobile company that has changed [...]
"Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago." Aircraft expert and enthusiast Bill Sweetman is pretty certain that the Aurora will [...]
We met Tom Szulborski by chance on an overcast Thursday at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum near Reading, PA. The day was World War II-themed: there were some folks in costume, others in flight suits, and largely one of the best examples of an agreeable crowd we'd ever seen. There’s no community quite like the aviation [...]
“But when I looked at it – when I saw what had taken place, and I saw the city covered, and what appeared to be going on…I knew that I just hadn’t even come close to imagining what the effect was.” Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. had seen combat; he’d seen a war-devastated Germany and [...]
Yosemite National Park, Inyo National Forest, Mono Lake There’s hardly a more beautiful place in the world than Mid-East California. The transitions happen quickly – one moment you’ll be above 12,000 ft., snow-covered peaks, and the next will bring sprawling grass meadows with bright flower beds. Near the border of California and Nevada (wherein things [...]
The BV 141: one mean, lean, lopsided machine. Let’s just face the facts: this thing is flat-out strange. Likely one of the only asymmetric aircraft in all of human history, what’s truly strange about the BV 141 is that it actually flew – and it flew pretty well! The BV 141 was actually intended to [...]
If my five-year-old self could’ve designed an airplane, it may have looked a lot like Alexander Lippisch’s Aerodyne. Lippisch – for the uninitiated – was a German engineer who was fundamental to the modern aircraft designs we see in use today. Lippisch was a phenomenal inventor and an incredible engineer. His most popular craft is [...]
Tom Cruise may be pushing the boundaries of insanity by many of our standards, but—dear lord—was there ever a face so exquisitely shaped for a pair of aviator sunglasses? Photo from bug-bytes.net. As you can see, Cruise is obscenely photogenic—as is his right-hand-iceman, Val Kilmer—in 1986’s Top Gun. While the late Tony Scott’s [...]
With the exotic name, the brilliant mind, the outlandish job title, and the handsome face, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, may have briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a supervillain. Thankfully – on the surface – he seems to be a pretty stand-up guy. Everything Elon Musk does is huge; in [...]
Let it be said: every pilot knows all too well the name of Howard Hughes. In a time when the long-running, American trend of neglecting the notion of a singular job title was beginning to catch momentum, Howard Hughes was world-famous aviator, aerospace engineer, entrepreneur, filmmaker, and philanthropist. As a man who represented extreme wealth [...]
