"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 [...]
Why did the airplane cross the globe? To set some pretty impressive records. What does it take to circumnavigate the globe? In the case of Solar Impulse 2 (which we talked about here), it takes a bit of sunshine and a lot of patience. But what does it take to circumnavigate the globe without stopping or refueling? For [...]
Things are really heating up in the world of jet engine parts Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMCs) are exacly what you might expect them to be: they are composite materials made from ceramic fibers embedded in a ceramic matrix. Simple enough, right? But what does ceramic have to do with jet engines? Sure, you might not think about [...]
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 [...]
A Day to Reflect Today is a day of remembrance, a day to respect and honor all of the individuals who have given their lives while serving in the military. Today is a day to honor those who sacrificed themselves in the course of fighting for liberty and justice. The official recognition of Memorial day [...]
A Sophisticated Heat Beam While the notion of lasers and particle beam weapons would have once been limited to the realms of science fiction, the truth is that ever since the laser was invented in 1960, it’s been leaching out of the Star Trek universe into our very real, very tangible world (and no, it’s [...]
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 [...]
Variations in language make life interesting, although those very same nuisances can make conversation confusing if you don't know what the heck they're talking about. And while we might be a little biased, we think that aviation slang marks for some of the coolest cultural and professional variation of the English language, which is why [...]
