1936 semi-autobiographical novel. Robert Owen, out of the Royal Air Force, goes to work as an instructor at a small flying club in an English cathedral town.
1995 space history, dir. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton; IMDb / AllMovie. Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.
1983 aviation/space, dir. Philip Kaufman, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn; IMDb / AllMovie. As the cutting edge of aviation shifts from transonic flight to spaceflight, NASA needs a new sort of hero.
1998 non-fiction. A Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper was en route from Noumea to Auckland when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. They were instructed to make their way back to the USA as best they could.
2019 non-fiction. On 17 April 2018, the Boeing 737-7H4 registered N772SW suffered a catastrophic engine failure at 32,000 feet over Pennsylvania. Only one person died. This is the story of the captain's life.
When the V-22 Osprey was still in development, one of the major roles it was expected to fill was that of submarine hunting. But this never happened, to the point that it's now largely been forgotten that it was ever contemplated. Why?
1942 autobiography of the first person to fly the Atlantic solo non-stop from east to west.
The Midland Air Museum is round the back of Coventry airport, next door to the now-deceased Electric Railway Museum, and I visited it on the same day. It has a strong focus on Armstrong Whitworth and related companies, which had a factory here. All photos are cc-by-sa as usual.
Near the Jyväskylä airport at Tikkakoski is the Suomen Ilmavoimamuseo, the museum of the Finnish Air Force. With photographs (all taken on the Lumix GF1): cc-by-sa on everything.
On a slightly warm February day, to Farnborough to visit the museum on the former site of the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
2002 non-fiction: George Dyson, son of Freeman, recounts what can be told of the history of Project Orion, a plan to propel spacecraft with nuclear explosions.
Ithacus was a 1966 study by Douglas, producers of the DC- series transport aircraft and the Thor IRBM, for a sub-orbital troop transport.
2013 non-fiction, an informal history of the rise and fall (sorry) of the man-carrying balloon.
To the de Havilland museum, on the last weekend before it closed for the winter. Many images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
I've been playing with software-defined radio and broadcast aviation data.
2000 non-fiction, a collection of anecdotes by officers of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
Yesterday RAF Northolt had its Centenary Open day. Yes, it was first used as a flying-field in May 1915. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
I'm trying to learn more about practical multirotor design with a view to designing and building my own. A multirotor flies essentially by replacing mechanical complexity with software complexity, which is lighter. Here's a bit more detail.
The D-21 was a supersonic reconnaissance drone used briefly in the 1960s and 1970s.
Earlier this month I visited the Swedish Air Force Museum near Linköping, on the site where Carl Cederström (Sweden's first aviator, like so many early flyers a member of the landed gentry with an interest in machinery and little to do) established the first Swedish flying school. Lots of images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
Aircraft-carrying submarines seem, superficially, like a really good idea. Unfortunately in practice they haven't really worked.
The Sea Dart (try not to associate that in your mind with Lawn Dart) was to be a supersonic flying-boat fighter.
The Saunders-Roe SR.45 Princess was the largest all-metal flying-boat ever built. Only three were made, and none was ever sold.
The YF-23 was a prototype that competed against the Lockheed YF-22 to become the USAF's Advanced Tactical Fighter in the 1990s; the Lockheed plane won.
The Yak-38 (NATO reporting name "Forger") was the Soviet carrier-borne fixed-wing aircraft of the Cold War.
The XV-4 was a prototype V/STOL aircraft built for the US Army.
The YB-35 and YB-49 were flying-wing bomber prototypes built during and in the wake of the Second World War.
The SeaMaster was to be a flying-boat strategic bomber for the U.S. Navy.
Yeah, I pretty much have to do this one, don't I? The Valkyrie was to be a Mach 3 high-altitude nuclear bomber.
The Vigilante was a carrier-borne supersonic bomber.
The TSR-2 was to be a highly capable low-and-fast bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. It was famously cancelled in 1965.
Not the ancestor of what would become the SR-71, this A-12 was to be the US Navy's very own stealth bomber.
One of the desiderata of an air defence system is to put defending fighters close to the high-value targets. That way they don't get decoyed away by diversionary attacks, giving the enemy bombers a clear run, because they're dedicated to protecting a specific target; nor do they need massive endurance (adding to weight), if they don't need to make long-distance flights.
The Cutlass was a high-subsonic carrier-borne fighter, flying off Essex and Midway-class carriers.
The Helistat was a hybrid airship/helicopter combination, designed for heavy vertical lift.
One of the great scars on the American military-aviation psyche was the unescorted bomber. As the men who'd been on the front lines during the Second World War became the leaders of the Air Force, they tried to do something about it.
The Hustler was not just the first aircraft to be named after a pornographic magazine (this is a lie, it first flew nearly twenty years before that was thought of), it was the world's first operational supersonic bomber.
The Peacemaker was the world's first intercontinental bomber, and the largest mass-produced piston-engined aircraft ever built.
The Short Mayo Composite was a solution to the range problem of fixed-wing aircraft.
The Caproni Ca.60, called the Noviplano or Capronissimo, was a prototype flying-boat airliner. Built in 1921,