Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Air & Space Magazine

Flight attendants could now focus on making long trips a delightful experience for those aboard. Before the Stratoliner came along, stewardesses had to be trained nurses to care for all the airsick passengers.

Above It All

It took a maze of valves and venturis—and a trio of tycoons—to whisk passengers into the stratosphere.

Inventions large and small have combined over the years to create the modern experience of air travel. And you don’t have to be a frequent flier to know that today’s airliner is still a work in progress: What you see today may not be there tomorrow.

Anatomy of an Airliner

Our maxim: The airlines giveth, and the airlines taketh away.

The Navy’s 85-foot-tall antenna at Point Mugu, California, relayed signals from the Syncom 3 satellite until 1966.

Spin Doctors

For that satellite dish on your roof and the phone calls you make to Japan, you can thank Harold Rosen.

Ejection from a TV-2.

The Road to the Future… Is Paved With Good Inventions

We bring you 10 great ideas that made flying safer, easier, or just a whole lot more fun.

Half-breed: Piasecki Aircraft has taken a Sikorsky helicopter and bolted on airplane hardware — a propeller (ducted) and a fixed wing — hoping the resulting X-49A SpeedHawk (top) will bust through the constraints that have kept helicopters slow.

Hot-Rod Helicopters

There’s just no way to add 100 mph to the speed of a helicopter. Or is there?

Tony Chong supervises a fantasy factory, where ideas are transformed into solid — and exquisite — objects.

Martial Arts

Memo to bad guys: Wanna know what U.S. warplanes you’ll tangle with in the future? Visit an aerospace model shop.

A Sea Dart takes off from San Diego Bay on a single ski, a design tested later in the program; earlier models used twin skis.

The Department of Never Mind

A collection of six inventions that prompt a single question: What the…?

To travel from star to star, ships could surf a wave in space-time itself. Since the 1990s, theories of interstellar flight have focused as much on gravity, electromagnetism, and the properties of space-time as on propulsion systems.

Mars, and Step on It

When it’s not the journey but the destination that counts.

The BA609.

Tiltrotors for the Rest of Us

An Osprey for commuters? Bring it on. Can we get a quiet car too?

Today’s state-of-the-art in imaging planets around other stars: combined Hubble telescope pictures (taken years apart) show a world three times as massive as Jupiter circling the star Fomalhaut.

Block That Star!

How can we find other Earths if their suns keep blinding us?

If engineers can corral liquid hydrogen, reshape pressure waves, and make fuel from algae, future airline passengers will travel around the world at hypersonic speeds in strange-looking aircraft.

The Perfect Airplane

Fast, green, and quiet. Come on, brainiacs, you can do it.

If you think airliner toilets are bad, check out the disposable pants (from the space shuttle era) you’d use in space.

In the Museum: Toilet Training

In the Museum: Toilet Training

In the May 25, 1909 issue of Britain’s The Aero, a caption referred to “The ailerons or small planes” (arrows) on Samuel Cody’s British Army Aeroplane.

Oldies and Oddities: Where Do Ailerons Come From?

Oldies and Oddities: Where Do Ailerons Come From?

None

Moments and Milestones: Unknown Unknowns

Moments and Milestones: Unknown Unknowns

Dyson during wilderness training in Russia, January 2009.

Handicapping the Space Tourism Market

Esther Dyson on touring space now and in the future.

None

September 2009 Sightings

September 2009 Sightings

090829-N-1928O-205 BELLEVUE, Neb. (Aug. 29, 2009) The U.S. Navy flight demonstration squadron, the Blue Angels, performs during the Defenders of Freedom Air Show at Offutt Air Force Base as part of Omaha Navy Week. The week is one of 21 Navy Weeks planned across America in 2009. Navy Weeks are designed to show Americans the investment they have made in their Navy and increase awareness in cities that do not have a significant Navy presence. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Mark O�Donald/Released)

Blue Wingtips

Navy to the Heartland: Don’t forget about us.

None

Light fuse. Step away.

…But not necessarily in that order, when you’re dealing with the world’s largest solid rocket motor. In fact, engineers who tried last Thursday to light the ATK five-segment motor planned for NASA’s Ares I rocket, were in an underground bunker half a mile away when ignition was to occur at a quar…

None

Back across the water

Weather permitting, a World War II-era B25D Mitchell bomber nicknamed “Grumpy” will take off tomorrow from Duxford, England and retrace (in reverse) the historic lend-lease route by which U.S. airplanes were delivered to Europe in the 1940s. The airplane, which saw its first duty with the Royal …

Who’s depressed? Not military pilots

Because they can’t be

Page 237 of 320