The Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation Keeps the Spirit Alive In 1988, one pilot founded The Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation with the goal of preserving the memory and legacy of "the greatest humanitarian and aviation event in history": The Berlin Airlift. At the end of WWII, a defeated Germany was divided into four sectors [...]
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 [...]
The man who wore many hats (although it's possible it was just a snake that swallowed an elephant) While the name Antoine de Saint-Exupéry might not resonate with you right away, there’s a good chance that you’re more familiar with him—or his work—than you might think. Ever hear of The Little Prince (or Le Petit [...]
Of all the animals who have found themselves written into the annals of aviation history, perhaps one of the oddest instances involves a woodchuck named Tailwind. Woodchucks don’t just accidentally find themselves in the air (they’re groundhogs, after all), at least not that we can surmise. No, in this instance, this rodent was brought aboard [...]
Ferdinand Adolph Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin With a name like that, you just know he was meant to do great things. We’ve talked about rigid airships before (remember the giant Airlander 10?) and how sometimes you need to look back when looking to the future. On this day (May 26) in 1909, the rigid [...]
Remembering the Roots of Modern Aviation In case you haven't already heard, Boeing is celebrating their centennial anniversary this year. Since July 15, 1916, Boeing has been shaping the history of aviation as we know it today. From the single wood and canvas airplanes of the past, to the space travel technologies of today, The [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
90 years for United Airlines hardly seems like a long time. For thousands of years, humans have always been fascinated by the prospect of flight. During the Middle Ages, several…erm…optimistic individuals strapped large, winged contraptions to their torsos: jumping off of high structures in a futile attempt to break away from the largely inconvenient but [...]
