People have been flying airplanes for well over a century. Engineers know how to balance all the forces at play, but still aren’t exactly sure how some of the physics of flight actually works.
One of the earliest depictions of flying witches is in a 15th-century text entitled “Le champion des dames,” or “The Defender of Ladies.”
Martin Le Franc/W. Schild. Die Maleficia der Hexenleut' via Wikimedia Commons
The iconic image of a witch on a broomstick has apocryphal origins. But whether they could actually fly didn’t stop Christian society from persecuting them.
A multiple-exposure photograph of insects circling a light at night.
Samuel Fabian
A commercial pilot turned management expert and author of ‘The Next Crash: How Short-Term Profit Seeking Trumps Airline Safety,’ explains the economics behind the near-deadly disaster.
Airlines are investing in sustainable biofuel startups and starting to uses alternative fuels, including cooking oil, ag waste and corn ethanol. But biofuels alone won’t be enough, research shows.
Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs.
Warpaint/Shutterstock
No, you’re not imagining it. Your body does some weird things up in the air. Here’s a guide to the common and merely embarrassing to the rare, but serious.
Air Canada and United Airlines both have orders for hybrid electric 30-seaters. An aerospace engineer explains where electrification, hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels are headed.
The hijacking of U.S. aircraft – like the three hijacked in 1970 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – made it impossible for American policymakers to ignore the threat.
Bettmann/Getty Images
From 1968 to 1974, US airlines experienced 130 hijackings. But it was Cooper’s hijacking-as-extortion plot that captured the public’s imagination – and inspired a copycat crime wave.
Ski jumpers use aerodynamics and physics to overcome gravity – at least for a while.
AP Photo/Matthias Schrader
Thousands of chemical compounds in wildfire smoke are interacting with each other and sunlight as the smoke travels. For people downwind, it can become more toxic over time.
Test pilot Chuck Yeager in the cockpit of the Bell X-1, in which he became the first recorded pilot to break the sound barrier – although others had likely died trying.
Jack Ridley/USAF
Fossils reveal that dinosaurs’ flying cousins become twice as efficient at flying over 150 million years.
A crowd greets Sen. John F. Kennedy at Logan Airport in Boston on July 17, 1960, after he became the Democratic nominee for president.
John M. Hurley/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Though air travel has boosted presidential campaigns for decades, the 2020 pandemic has underlined the importance of aircraft as the quickest and safest way to campaign.
Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century; ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, The University of Melbourne