Aviation History - Page 2

The Taraia Object expedition sails Oct. 7 to test whether a shape in a Nikumaroro lagoon is Amelia Earhart’s Electra, the plane Purdue helped buy.

Amelia Earhart vanished on July 2, 1937, near Howland Island. The radio calls, the fuel, the sun line, and what the evidence says about each theory.

The Wright brothers’ first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet on December 17, 1903. What happened, who saw it, and why the credit was disputed.

Fighter jets of the Vietnam War ranked by impact: the F-4 Phantom II, the MiG-21 that hunted it, and the eight combat jets that fought between them.

Aerial firefighting plays a crucial role in helping ground crews combat the most dangerous and violent wildfires. On more than one occasion, it has been the difference between successfully containing a wildfire and letting it endanger huge swathes of the population. Though indispensable now, throughout the history of aerial firefighting, it hasn’t always been so.

Air travel has been around for over a century, and a lot has changed since then. Someone sitting down for a trip in a plane in 1922 had a very different experience from passengers sitting down for a long-haul flight today. So, what was air travel in the 1920s really like, and how different was

It’s easy to forget this when you cram into a passenger liner, but aviation is still a relatively new field. The past century or so of aviation has included many spectacular firsts and broken barriers. Here are some of the best history-defining moments of aviation history. The heady early days of aviation were full of

After the invention of airplanes in the 1900s and the refinement of flight in the 1910s, including the first widespread usage of aviation for military purposes, the 1920s ushered in a new era for planes. Mass fascination with flying took off as much as the development of new, innovative technological models. Here are some of

The 1930s were the second half of what is commonly known as the Golden Age of Aviation. As in the 1920s, rapid developments in technology and investment in aviation that didn’t stop even during the Great Depression made air travel more common. However, what was it like to get on a plane in the 1930s?

Look at old warplanes, and you’ll probably notice some major differences between them and modern models. The designs are clunkier and vintage. The paint jobs are also different and more whimsical, including targets often painted on many models. That seems counterintuitive—isn’t the point that armies don’t want the enemy to hit the plane? The targets