The students visiting Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford, Conn., on Friday looked like any bunch of students on a school trip. As they toured a hangar looking at classic aircraft, they raced under a plane’s wings, acted as if they were pilots and looked a little bored as a volunteer explained the history of one of the planes. [...]
Four people were killed when a Russian Tupolev Tu-204 medium-haul airliner overshot the runway while landing at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport and caught fire on Saturday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The cause of the incident was not immediately clear. Sources in the Emergencies Ministry said pilot error is being viewed as the probable cause. There were eight people [...]
Like some hypersonic carrot, the idea of breakfast in Paris; breakfast again in New York; then late night cocktails in Tokyo — all within the same 12 hour workday — has been dangled in front of the flying public for so long now that any mention of Mach 7 aircraft may trigger involuntary eye-rolls. Hypersonics using [...]
“Putt! Putt! Putt! Putt!” Imitating the sound of a Curtiss Condor’s engines failing, Frank Baron Jr. mimics the tumbling motions of the aircraft falling from the sky. His hands rush to his shoulders as if grabbing for parachute straps. “I thought, ‘This is it,’ and then all of a sudden, brrrr!” he said, describing the sound [...]
The U.S. fleet of 20 B-2 Spirit stealth bombers recently received new radar systems. In the Radar Modernization Program (RMP), Northrop Grumman—maker of the B-2 and manager of RMP—says installation at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri was finished ahead of schedule in September [2012]. The installation was once slated to be complete in 2010 and [...]
After years of delays, cost issues and technical glitches, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is moving toward becoming operational. The Marine Corps is moving aggressively to be first with the JSF by kicking off operations at Yuma, Arizona, with squadron VMFA (AW)-121 “Green Knights” early in 2013. The JSF’s future depends largely [...]
Walter Boyne, former director of the National Air and Space Museum, explains the business from the inside out By Barrett Tillman Humans are collectors. We keep items that are important to us and preserve them for future memory—our own and memories of those yet unborn. Therefore, museums represent the institutional memory of nations and cultures, [...]
Did McDonnell design the world’s first stealth aircraft … before Pearl Harbor? By Steve Pace Founded by James S. McDonnell in 1939, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation (McAir) became a major supplier of fighter aircraft to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. Yet its first fighter-type offerings—Models 1 through 5, were presented to the U.S. [...]
