Aviation History Posts

Interactive exhibits aside, the unifying prohibition at most museums is “Do Not Touch!” A look at the shiny noses on bronze busts of notable figures tactilely demonstrates the long-term wear that would damage more fragile artifacts of hi…

Pinned against the hangar wall by a floor-filling mass of airplanes from a B-25 to a Pietenpol, The Mid-Atlantic Air Museum’s P-61 Black Widow restoration project seems unchanged from my last visit in 2014. Wearing its cowled but propless Prat…

Jumping from any elevation, even a knee-high footstool, has never been something I have eagerly anticipated, which makes my lifelong fascination with parachutes hard to explain.It all started in the early 1960s, I think, with my godparents, who fed…

The U.S. Air Force opened the doors on its new, and as yet unnamed, long-range strike bomber, the B-21. The contract pasted in the cockpit window said each bomber would cost $500 million and the total program cost for a fleet of 100 B-21s would be $…

Maybe it’s a pilot thing, but I find the insides of airplanes just as interesting, and often more interesting, than their outsides. Cockpits and crew stations is where humans interface with the machine that carries them aloft, and I’m al…

On your way someplace else, how many times have you passed a sign pointing to a small town airport? The more important question is how many times have you followed that sign?With the potential for unknown delays between the sign and your intended d…

The men who united as a crew in the vertical war over Europe after Pearl Harbor have all since surrendered, as we all must one day, to time. Its last living member, radio operator Robert Hanson, passed into history in 2005 at age 85. But their spir…