We can’t get enough of aviation movies over here at the Flight Blog. Seriously, what’s the best alternative to being a pilot? Watching some great movies with some even greater pilots. It’s a surefire way to feel some secondhand awesomeness-by-proxy. Clint Eastwood’s Sully has recently hit theaters. The film stars Tom Hanks as Chesley ‘Sully’ [...]
Airline ads really took off during the Golden Age of Aviation, but now seem to have fallen rather flat. I’m nearly a decade late to the party, but I‘ve recently started watching Mad Men, and suffice it to say I'm rather hooked. This is a spoiler-free post (in the event that I’m not the only [...]
Sky's the limit for a comeback You might have noticed that thick, white letters don't really dominate the sky anymore. Have you seen any "Marry me" or "I love U" notes lately? It certainly isn’t as common as it used to be. What we might now think of as old-fashioned or antique or even low-tech, [...]
The Spruce Goose: an incredible feat of modern engineering and one of the most famous aircraft in the history of flight. Howard Hughes – in modern times (shamefully) known best as the character that Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in The Aviator – will go down in history as an aviation revolutionary, a brilliant thinker, and a [...]
Do you ever get tired of the same old view from the same old ground? Of Course you do. Just because we were born to have two feet planted on the ground doesn’t mean that we have to limit our perception of the world to a constant 5-foot-8-inch view (or other perfectly respectable heights). This [...]
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 [...]
There's something about flying in a heavier-than-air craft 30,000 feet in the air that leads to plentiful fact or fiction debate across the internet...even in this day and age where the answers are quite literally right at our fingertips. Regardless of how or why these flying urban legends continue to proliferate the good old American psyche, we at the [...]
Let slip the dogs of war Antis and Robert Bozděch (source: Daily Mail) January 1940: Phoney War. Václav Robert Bozděch and Pierre Duval were on a reconnaissance mission over the German front in their twin-seater Potez 630 aircraft when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire. They crashed in no-mans land between the French [...]
Humans have always been rather obsessed with the notion of flight, well before the development of modern airplanes. In fact, many early civilizations bore myths and legends of mankind and gods alike taking flight. Perhaps the most well-known and referenced myth regarding man and flight is the Greek story of Daedalus and Icarus: Daedalus, an inventor, fashioned a [...]
Supersonic commercial transport existed for 30 years--what happened? The 1950s was a time of communism, capitalism, polypropylene, and polio vaccines--not to mention the maturity and growth of television sets, solar-powered wrist watches, and the beginnings of the Concorde project. By the early 1950s, Arnold Hall (director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment) asked Morien Morgan (a [...]
