Famous Lasts

To our knowledge, this has been done just once, in March of 1967 during the Vietnam War, when an American pilot, Captain Robert Pardo, used the canopy of his McDonnell Douglas F-4, suffering damage from anti-aircraft fire, to help extend the flight time of another F-4. To do this, Pardo positioned his jet beneath the […]

Can a plane land inverted? Of course, it can. Aerobatic airplanes are regularly flown upside down. But landing? Piece of cake for a skilled aerobatic ace, though. But unless it’s got landing gear on top, it’ll probably be their last landing. Aerobatic performer and Hollywood actor Craig Hosking has done it, many times! For a […]

To commemorate a famous 1944 dogfight, in which American P-51 pilot and fighter ace William Overstreet Jr. chased a Messerschmitt 109 under the Eiffel Tower, a Bonanza in 1991 repeated the feat, with support from the French government. How many pilots have flown under the arch of the tower? Probably more than a few. It […]

Didier Delsalle landed his Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel atop the world’s highest piece of real estate on May 14, 2005. He repeated the feat the next day to show it was no fluke. No fluke, but it was treacherous and super risky. The hardest part, he said, was landing on the snow, not knowing how much […]

In 1944, the first person to fly a powered heavier-than-air craft made one last flight, hopping a ride with Howard Hughes aboard a Lockheed Constellation. Orville Wright was 73 years old. (His brother Wilbur had died in 1912 of typhoid fever.) Four years after his literal final sortie, Orville took his figurative last flight, dying […]

The 1979 class was the last one that featured an all-male cast, as in 1976, 176 female cadets joined the ranks and graduated in 1980. Hats off to all!

As of 2015 in the United States, the noisiest jets (Stage 1) were banned from operating, part of a successful program to cut aircraft noise by a whopping 32dB.

Smoking on a plane. Makes sense, right? No! But for decades, it was standard practice. Over time, good sense took hold, and lighting up in the cabin was crushed out like a bad butt. On June 3, 2000, the United States banned smoking on all domestic and international commercial flights. China didn’t ban smoking on […]

A pair of aviators, Bob Timm and John Cook, set the endurance record of all endurance records when, in 1958, they flew a specially outfitted and highly modified Cessna 172 around the desert of the American Southwest for 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes. During that time, they were refueled more than 125 times […]

This is as crazy as it sounds, but on two separate occasions, a total of three wingsuit flyers flew into the open doors of an airplane. The most recent and presumably last such leap was accomplished in 2017 by Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet, who lept from an alpine peak and flew into the open […]