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The Aviation Portal

A Boeing 747 in 1978 operated by Pan Am

Aviation includes the activities surrounding mechanical flight and the aircraft industry. Aircraft includes fixed-wing and rotary-wing types, morphable wings, wing-less lifting bodies, as well as lighter-than-air craft such as hot air balloons and airships.

Aviation began in the 18th century with the development of the hot air balloon, an apparatus capable of atmospheric displacement through buoyancy. Some of the most significant advancements in aviation technology came with the controlled gliding flying of Otto Lilienthal in 1896; then a large step in significance came with the construction of the first powered airplane by the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. Since that time, aviation has been technologically revolutionized by the introduction of the jet which permitted a major form of transport throughout the world. (Full article...)

Selected article

Ben Gurion International Airport is the largest and busiest international airport in Israel, with about 10.2 million passengers passing through it in 2007. It was known as Wilhelma Airport when it was first founded by the British Mandate of Palestine. It was known as Lod Airport from 1948 until 1973, when the name was changed to honor Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

The airport is located near the city of Lod, 15 km (9 mi) southeast of Tel Aviv. It is operated by the Israel Airports Authority, a government-owned corporation that manages all public airports and border crossings in Israel. Ben Gurion Airport is on Highway 1, the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway, accessible by car or public bus.

Ben Gurion Airport is the hub of El Al, Israir Airlines, Arkia Israel Airlines, and Sun d'Or International Airlines. During the 1980s and 1990s, it was a focus city of the now-defunct Tower Air. Today, Terminal 3 is used for international flights, and Terminal 1 is used for domestic flights. The airport has three runways and is used by commercial, private, and military aircraft.

Ben Gurion Airport is considered to be among the five best airports in the Middle East due to its passenger experience and its high level of security. Security forces such as Israel Police officers, IDF and Israel Border Police soldiers are complemented by airport security guards who operate both in uniform and undercover. The airport has been the target of several terrorist attacks, but no attempt to hijack a plane departing from Ben Gurion airport has succeeded. (Full article...)

Selected image

USS Akron over Manhattan
USS Akron over Manhattan
The airship USS Akron} flying over the southern tip of Manhattan circa 1931–1933. The Akron was a commissioned 'ship' of the United States Navy, built for them by the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation in Akron, Ohio. She cast off for her maiden voyage on 2 November 1931, but crashed less than two years later.

Did you know

...that the Brimstone missile, an anti-tank guided missile, is carried by three Royal Air Force aeroplane types?

Bede BD-4

...that during Operation Deep Freeze II in 1956, US Navy Rear Admiral George J. Dufek commanded the first aircraft to land at the South Pole, the C-47 Skytrain “Que Sera Sera”?

More Did you know facts

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various aviation-related articles on Wikipedia.

In the news

Wikinews Aviation portal
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Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Selected biography

Charles Yeager
Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager (born February 13, 1923) is a retired Brigadier-General in the United States Air Force and a noted test pilot. In 1947, he became the first pilot (at age 24) to travel faster than sound in level flight and ascent.

His career began in World War II as a private in the U.S. Army Air Forces. After serving as an aircraft mechanic, in September 1942 he entered enlisted pilot training and upon graduation was promoted to the rank of Flight Officer (WW 2 U.S. Army Air Forces rank equivalent to Warrant Officer) and became a P-51 Mustang fighter pilot. After the war he became a test pilot of many kinds of aircraft and rocket planes. Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental Bell X-1 at Mach 1 at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 m). Although Scott Crossfield was the first man to fly faster than Mach 2 in 1953, Yeager shortly thereafter exceeded Mach 2.4.[1] He later commanded fighter squadrons and wings in Germany and in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and in recognition of the outstanding performance ratings of those units he then was promoted to Brigadier-General. Yeager's flying career spans more than sixty years and has taken him to every corner of the globe, even into the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.

Selected Aircraft

The Beechcraft King Air is a line of twin-turboprop aircraft produced by the Beech Aircraft Corporation (now the Beechcraft Division of Hawker Beechcraft). The King Air has been in continuous production since 1964, the longest production run of any civilian turboprop aircraft. It has outlasted all of its previous competitors and as of 2006 is one of only two twin-turboprop business airplanes in production (the other is the Piaggio Avanti).

Historically, the King Air family comprises a number of models that fall into four families, the Model 90 series, Model 100 series, Model 200 series, and Model 300 series. The last two types were originally marketed as the Super King Air, but the "Super" moniker was dropped in 1996. As of 2006, the only small King Air in production is the conventional-tail C90GT.

  • Span: 50 ft 3 in (15.33 m)
  • Length: 35 ft 6in (10.82 m)
  • Height: 14 ft 3 in (4.35 m)
  • Engines: 2 × Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-21 turboprops, 550 shp (410 kW) each
  • Cruising Speed: 284 mph (247 knots ,457 km/h)
  • First Flight: May 1963
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Today in Aviation

November 17

  • 2012 – Syrian rebels capture a Syrian government air base near rebel-held Abu Kamal, Syrian, meaning that the only air base the Syrian government holds in the Deiz ez-zor reigion is the main one near the city of Deiz ez-zor itself.[3]
  • 2003 – Concorde G-BOAE Departed London Heathrow for the last time. Flew direct and retired at Grantley Adams International Airport, Barbados
  • 1995 – Rollout of the first HAL Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) technology demonstrator, TD-1
  • 1967 – American aircraft strike Bac Mai airfield near Hanoi for the first time.
  • 1955 – One of the pilots of two USMC Grumman F9F Panther fighters that collided over the Mojave Desert near Lancaster, California, was killed this date. The dead pilot was identified as Lt. Donald R. Roland, formerly of Itasca, Illinois. The pilot of the other plane, Lt. Robert F. Heinecken, of Riverside, California, made an emergency landing and was uninjured. The planes were from MCAS El Toro, California.
  • 1955 – Douglas MC-54M Skymaster, 44-9068, c/n 27294/DO240, attached to the 1700th Air Transport Group, of the Military Air Transport Service, at Kelly AFB, Texas, crashes into Mount Charleston, ~20 miles WNW of Las Vegas, Nevada, while on a routine flight with technical personnel from the Lockheed "Skunk Works" at Burbank, California where it had picked up passengers after departing Norton Air Force Base, California. It was en route to Groom Lake, Nevada, the secret Area 51, when it was blown off course by a severe storm, killing all 14 on board, nine civilians and five military. Because of the secrecy involved with the Lockheed U-2 project, the C-54 crew was never in contact with Air Traffic Control, and, off course and lost in clouds, an error in plotting the position of the Skymaster in relation to the Spring Mountains range resulted in the crash only 50 feet below the crest of an 11,300-foot ridge leading to the peak of Mount Charleston. Lockheed subsequently assumes responsibility for the flights to "Watertown", using a company-owned C-47.
  • 1954 – A B-47 is forced by bad weather to remain aloft for 47 hours 35 min, requiring to do air-to-air refueling nine times before successfully landing.
  • 1954 – Lt. Col. John Brooke England (1923–1954) is killed in a crash near Toul-Rosieres Air Base, France when he banks away from a barracks area while landing his North American F-86 Sabre in a dense fog. His engine flamed out. He was on a rotational tour from Alexandria AFB, Louisiana, with the 389th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, which he commanded. He was a leading and much-decorated North American P-51 Mustang ace during World War II. Col. England flew 108 missions and scored 19 aerial victories-including 4 on one mission. England also served as a combat pilot in the Korean War. Alexandria Air Force Base is renamed England Air Force Base in his honor on 23 June 1955.
  • 1954 – Fairey FD.2, WG774, a single-engined transonic research aircraft, the last British design to hold the World Air Speed Record, suffers engine failure on 14th flight when internal pressure build-up collapses the fuselage collector tank at 30,000 feet (9,100 m), 30 miles (48 km) from Boscombe Down. Fairey pilot Peter Twiss, stretches glide, dead-sticks into airfield, drops undercarriage at last moment but only nose gear deploys, jet bellies in, sustaining damage that sidelines it for eight months. Twiss, only shaken up, receives the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. FD.2 test program does not resume until August 1955.
  • 1953 – USAF Fairchild C-119F-KM Flying Boxcar, 51-8163, crashed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, during a joint airborne operation. One of 12 C-119s on a troop drop, it lost an engine, dropped out of formation, hit and killed ten troopers in their chutes that had been dropped from other aircraft, that in addition to four crew members and one medical officer that went down with the plane.
  • 1952 – On the first launch attempt of the Martin B-61A Matador, GM-11042, the JATO booster malfunctions and penetrates the rocket which then crashes 400 feet from the launch point.
  • 1945 – A USAAF Republic P-47N Thunderbolt, 44-88938, crashes between two houses on Windsor Parkway in Hempstead, New York shortly after take-off from Mitchel Field, setting both structures on fire. Morning accident kills pilot, 1st Lt. Daniel D. A. Duncan, 24, of New Iberia, Louisiana.
  • 1944 – The U. S. submarine USS Spadefish (SS-411) torpedoes and sinks the Japanese aircraft carrier Shinyo with the loss of 1,130 lives. There are 70 survivors.
  • 1943 – Air Solomons (AirSols) fighters intercept 35 Japanese planes heading for a strike on the U. S. landings on Bougainville, shooting down 16 for the loss of two F4U Corsairs. An Japanese torpedo bomber sinks a U. S. destroyer-transport off Bougainville with heavy loss of life.
  • 1941 – Ernst Udet, the Luftwaffe's Director-General of Equipment and the second-highest German ace of World War I (62 victories), commits suicide.
  • 1940 – Operation White, a second attempt by the British aircraft carrier HMS Argus to fly off aircraft – 14 RAF Hawker Hurricanes and two Fleet Air Arm Blackburn Skuas – to Malta fails almost completely when the aircraft are launched at too great a range and become lost in bad weather. Only four Hurricanes and one Skua reach Malta; the other Hurricanes all ditch in the Mediterranean with the loss of all but one of their pilots, and the one Skua crash lands on Sicily, where the Italians capture its crew.
  • 1926 – Mario de Bernardi breaks his four-day old world speed record, reaching 416.618 km/h (258.875 mph) in the same Macchi M.39 at Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA.
  • 1910 – Ralph Johnstone, a pilot for the Wright Exhibition Team, becomes the first American pilot to die in a plane crash when his machine breaks apart in mid air in full view of about 5,000 spectators at Denver, Colorado.
  • 1906 – The Daily Mail of London offers a £10,000 prize for the first flight from London to Manchester.

References

  1. ^ Yeager, Chuck and Janos, Leo. Yeager: An Autobiography. p. 252 (paperback). New York: Bantam Books, 1986. ISBN 0-553-25674-2.
  2. ^ Brulliard, Karin, and Abigail Hauslohner, "Gaza Clash Widens," The Washington Post, November 18, 2012, Page A1.
  3. ^ Anonymous, "Syrian rebels 'seize airport near Iraq,'" AL Jazeera, 18 November 2012, 03:36.
  4. ^ Hogg, Jonny, "U.N. Aerial Assault Hits Rebel Forces in Congo," The Washington Post, November 18, 2012, Page A16.
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