Tag: airplanes

D-Dalus: Dawn of the flying car?

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/06/Dawn-of-the-Flying-Cars.mp3[/podcast] “Hey, dude, where’s my flying car?” is a cry every science fiction writer has heard—and every science fiction reader has uttered—since the future supposedly arrived on January 1, 2001, and we found ourselves still stuck to the ground, rolling along on rubber tires. The problem has been that we really only have a few …

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The First World War Memoirs of Sampson J. Goodfellow, Part 17: First Flight and Commissioning

I’m posting the First World War memoirs of my grandfather-in-law, Sampson J. Goodfellow, a few pages at a time… (Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16.) We were moved to …

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A 737 hitchhiker?

This is literally unbelievable: MOSCOW, September 24 (RIA Novosti) – A 15-year-old boy from the Urals suffered acute frostbite after riding the wing of a Boeing-737 plane on a two-hour flight from Perm to Moscow, Russian radio station Mayak reported on Monday. After clinging on for the entire 1300-kilometer (808-mile) flight to Vnukovo Airport, the …

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Your flying saucer is ready:

Moller International has started production of a hovercar, a small two-passenger saucer-shaped vehicle designed to take off and land vertically. It’s going to be priced at $90,000 to $125,000 U.S.

Tired of computer flight sims?

Now you can build your own Spitfire…from a kit. The importer of the packs, Kieran Padden, says that business is booming – and for many reasons. “It is so easy to fly,” he claims of the plane that costs a tenth of the original to buy. “Even old Spitfire pilots I have spoken to say …

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Rise of the aircar?

Gress Aerospace has plans for an automobile-sized single seat vertical take-off and landing aircraft. In SF circles, we call that an “aircar.”

Another Edward Willett

I just discovered that I share a name with one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen (you have to register with the Dayton Daily News to follow that first link, by the way; if you do, you’ll see Edward Willett of Yellow Springs, Ohio, is mentioned as one of the other pilots from the Dayton area …

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Test flying a 70-year-old airplane

A pilot (with a great sense of humour) gets his first chance to fly a DC3, more than 70 years after the famous aircraft first took to the skies. Today, decades later, scores are still in operation. My favorite line: I was much taken by the crew escape hatch on the left-hand fuselage side, just …

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Soaring

The airplane in front of us begins to roll, the 60-metre yellow nylon rope connecting us to it tightens, and suddenly the glider I’m in comes to life, jouncing across the grass airstrip. In seconds we rise into the cloud-studded sky. # All aircraft fly because their wings are shaped so that the air travelling …

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Skydiving

  “Go!” yelled the instructor. Over strenuous objections from brain and body, I let go of the airplane’s strut and stepped sideways into 3,500 feet of air. I fell: two simple words that don’t do the experience justice. I’d been training all day. I was supposed to arch and count to five. I didn’t. Every …

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Flight

In this age of 747s and Concordes and supersonic jet fighters, it’s sometimes hard to realize that airplanes have existed for less than a century. Even manned gliders, which came before powered airplanes, have only been around for slightly over a hundred years. In fact, 1991 was the 100th anniversary of the first glider flight …

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