Have you ever wanted to see how is it onboard the A380? If yes, and never got the chance to do it, you better hurry up. The last A380 ever built left Toulouse on 17th March 2021, with test registration F-WWSH and with the destination Hamburg. There the aircraft was painted and delivered to Emirates with…
Category: #Aerotrivia
Commercial Space Flight
Did you know that before 2012, only government-operated vehicles had ever visited the ISS? The Dragon was the station’s first commercial vehicle to dock. The achievement was a crowning triumph for the commercial spaceflight business, which has irreversibly transformed the sector during the last ten years. The space sector has transformed in the last decade,…
The International Space Station, ISS
The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). The ISS flies 400km at speeds that defy gravity. It takes only 92 minutes to make a complete circuit of…
Starlink Satellites
In high-density cities, the communication satellite network SpaceX envisions was publicly disclosed in January 2015, with bandwidth capable of carrying up to 50% of all backhaul communications traffic and up to 10% of local Internet traffic. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, stated that there is a large unmet need for low-cost global internet capabilities. SpaceX…
Wernher von Braun
Dr. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer born on 23 March 1912 in Wirsitz. He was the second of three sons of a noble Lutheran family. From birth, he held the title of Freiherr (equivalent to Baron), his father being a civil servant and conservative politician that served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic. The family moved to Berlin in 1915,…
Blue Origin
Blue Origin, LLC, based in Kent, Washington, is a privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services provider. It was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon. Bezos has been a space enthusiast since an early age. Bezos, on an interview for his high school after being named valedictorian, said…
Rockwell XFV-12
The Rockwell XFV-12 was an American prototype of a supersonic carrier-based VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) fighter developed during the early 1970s for the U.S. Navy under the Vertical Fighter Attack-X program. Rockwell International, a Boeing predecessor company, submitted an entry featuring a Thrust Augmenter Wing (TAW) concept and was awarded a $47 million contract…
Caproni
Società de Agostini e Caproni, also known as Caproni was an Italian aircraft manufacturer. Giovanni Battista “Gianni” Caproni, an Italian aviation pioneer and aeronautical engineer, started the firm in 1908. From 1911, it was known as Società de Agostini e Caproni, and later Società Caproni e Comitti. Caproni was in charge of completing the first…
Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly around the world
Geraldine “Jerrie” Fredritz Mock was born on November 22, 1925 and was the first woman to fly solo around the world back in 1964. Jerrie Mock first flew with her father in the cockpit of a Ford Trimotor airplane and when she began high school, took an engineering course of which she was the only…
Aurel Vlaicu
Born on November 19th 1882, Aurel Vlaicu was a Romanian engineer, inventor, airplane constructor and pilot. He was born in Bintinti in Transylvania and was a high school colleague of Petru Groza (politician). He went to university at the Technical University of Budapest and Technische Hochschule München in Germany, ending up earning his engineer’s diploma…