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…
Tag: aeronautical
Best ace of all time
Erich Alfred Hartmann,” Bubi”, was a German fighter pilot during World War II and the most successful fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare. He was born on 19 April 1922 in Weissach, Württemberg, to Doctor Alfred Erich Hartmann and his wife, Elisabeth Wilhelmine Machtholf but due to the Great Recession he moved to China with his parents….
The airplane that became ”Flak-Bait”
This is the story of a B-26 Marauder bomber that survived two years of the most intense aerial combat of World War II, taking every bullet that German gunners and fighter pilots threw at it. This airplane was manufactured by Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland in 1943 and is the aircraft that holds the…
Alberto Santos Dumont
On the 20th of July 1873, Alberto Santos Dumont, an important pioneer aviator, was born in Palmira, Brazil. The 6th of 8 children of Henrique Dumont and Francisca de Paula Santos traveled in 1891 at the age of 18 to Europe, where he perfected his English by spending some months in England. He also climbed…
Urban Air Mobility
Have you ever wondered how would it be to fly to school or work? In the next 3 to 5 years it could become a possibility. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) envisions a safe and efficient aviation transportation system that will use highly automated aircraft that will operate and transport passengers or cargo at lower altitudes within urban…
An endurance record
Have you ever wondered how it is to fly for one or two days without stopping? How about 64 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes, and 5 seconds? This is the world record for an endurance flight and it was established by Robert Timm and John Cook in 1959. But where did it all began? In 1958…
The Starship
If you are a passionate of the space exploration and its colonization ultimately, you may have attended to two events this week: the space bingo of where the Chinese rocket “Long March” was about to crash (which ended happily) and the first successful flight and landing of the SpaceX’s SN15 Starship, this is what we…
The UltraFan by Rolls-Royce
The UltraFan is a new generation turbofan engine manufactured by Rolls-Royce which could be ready for service from 2025. The main purpose of this new engine is to get a better fuel economy, promising at least 25% improvement in fuel burn, achieved by a variable pitch fan system. The geared pitch UltraFan aims for a 15:1 bypass ratio and…
The Bell X-1
The history of engineering is a history of breaking barriers and in aviation we all know one barrier that seems easy on today’s planes to break but was a huge trouble in late 40s, and yes, it’s the sound barrier. Back in the World War II, the necessity of having faster and better planes than the enemy lead to a great jump in aviation technology: the mad…
Welcome on board, this is your airplane speaking…
As the years pass by, the technology around us is evolving day by day and even we have artificial intelligence on our smartphones or in our cars, aviation is lagging behind in this area. But what is AI? Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing…