Powered flight is younger than the telephone, and most of what matters happened in a single long rush. These thirty-six stories run from three farm animals sent up over Versailles to a solar airplane circling the planet, by way of the mechanic who built the first engine, the airliner that finally made passengers profitable, and a few spectacular wrong turns.
Every tile in a Aviation game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1The brothers who found the textbooks were wrong
On the tile: Wind tunnel1901
In 1901 the Wrights' new glider produced only about a third of the lift the published tables promised. Rather than guess, they built a wind tunnel in their Dayton bicycle shop, a long wooden box with a fan pushing air down it, and tested miniature wings by the hundred. Between one and two hundred shapes went through it, and about thirty of the best were measured in detail. The tables they wrote themselves, not the ones in the books, produced the 1903 Flyer.
The Wrights asked engine makers for a 180-pound motor of eight or nine horsepower. All ten firms that answered turned them down; none wanted to build a single engine of that kind. So the brothers turned to the man who minded their bicycle shop. Charlie Taylor worked without engineering drawings, shaping the crankshaft, valves and connecting rods with bicycle tools. In six weeks he produced a four-cylinder engine with an aluminum crankcase that made twelve horsepower, more than the eight required. They had hired him at eight dollars a week more than his old job.
3Two thousand glides, and the data the Wrights used
On the tile: Lilienthal1891-1896
Otto Lilienthal spent the 1870s and 1880s measuring wing shapes and air pressures, then went out and flew what he had learned. Between 1891 and 1896 he made close to two thousand short flights in sixteen different glider designs, hanging in a harness and swinging his legs to shift his weight and steer. He was killed in a crash in August 1896. The Wright brothers took both his method and his published data as their starting point, and one of his gliders is on display in the Smithsonian's Early Flight gallery today.
Before anyone would risk a person, the Montgolfier brothers sent livestock. On September 19, 1783, in front of Louis XVI and a crowd at Versailles, their balloon rose carrying a sheep, a duck and a rooster in a wicker basket. It climbed about 600 meters, drifted some three and a half kilometers, and came down in the Wood of Vaucresson eight minutes after lift-off. All three passengers survived, and the king rewarded them with places in the royal menagerie.
The idea came up at dinner in 1909, when the airplane builder Charles Voisin suggested to a Parisian stage performer that she learn to fly. On March 8, 1910, Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman anywhere to hold a pilot's license, issued by the Aero-Club de France. The French press called her la femme-oiseau, the bird woman. She was still flying nine years later, setting a women's altitude record of 4,785 meters shortly before she was killed testing an aircraft.
No American flight school would take a Black woman, so Bessie Coleman crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at the Caudron brothers' school in France. On June 15, 1921, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale issued her license, the first one an African American woman had held. She came home to Chicago a barnstormer, performing stunts at exhibitions, and opened a beauty parlor to help pay for the flight school she meant to start for Black students.
Eugene Bullard left Georgia as a boy, boxed his way across England and France, and joined the French Foreign Legion at nineteen. He earned his pilot's wings in the summer of 1917 and flew for France, one of the first African American military pilots. When American fliers in French service were taken into the United States Army Air Service, Bullard was refused. In 1994 the United States Air Force gave him a posthumous commission.
Amelia Earhart left Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on the evening of May 20, 1932, meaning to fly her Lockheed Vega to Paris. Ice on the wings, a leaking fuel tank and engine trouble changed the plan. About fifteen hours and 2,026 miles later she put down in a field near Culmore, outside Londonderry, becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone and nonstop, and only the second person of any kind to do it.
Elrey Jeppesen flew the mail in the early 1930s, when pilots navigated by road maps and railroad tracks and lost friends to winter weather. He bought a ten-cent notebook and started filling it: field lengths and elevations, slopes, drainage, obstacles. He spent days measuring towers and smokestacks himself. Other pilots asked for copies, so he sold them at ten dollars apiece and added whatever they sent back. The notebook became the Jeppesen Airway Manual.
The Smithsonian once displayed a rebuilt machine by its own former secretary, Samuel Langley, under a label calling it the first aircraft capable of sustained flight. Orville Wright, who knew better, shipped the 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928 rather than leave it with a museum that would not credit him. It stayed about twenty years, spending the war underground outside the city. The Smithsonian recanted, and the Flyer was installed in Washington on December 17, 1948, forty-five years to the day after Kitty Hawk.
The Ryan monoplane Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris had fuel tanks where the windshield should have been. The tanks went forward to balance the airplane and the cockpit was set back for safety, which left the pilot no view straight ahead. Lindbergh used a small periscope for that, and otherwise flew by the side windows and his compass. The wings were stretched ten feet to carry the extra fuel and lift it.
3The first airliner that could fly above the weather
On the tile: Stratoliner1938
Boeing's Model 307 Stratoliner borrowed the wings, tail and engines of the B-17 bomber and put them on a fat new fuselage that could hold pressure. First flown in late 1938, it was the first airliner with a pressurized cabin: it cruised at 20,000 feet while the cabin felt like 8,000, so its thirty-three passengers rode over the weather instead of through it. Ten were built. One of them, Pan American's Clipper Flying Cloud, survives at the Smithsonian.
In the 1930s few runways could take a big long-range airplane, but every coastal city had a harbor, so the ocean routes belonged to flying boats. Pan American's Boeing 314 Clipper carried a sit-down dining room with china and linen, a bar, dressing rooms, sleeping berths and a honeymoon suite. On June 28, 1939, the Dixie Clipper began scheduled transatlantic passenger service from New York to Marseilles. The one-way fare was 375 dollars, and there was only one class.
Everyone calls it the Spruce Goose, and almost none of it is spruce. Wartime restrictions put steel and aluminum out of reach, so Howard Hughes built his enormous flying boat from laminated birch, using a plywood process called Duramold. Its wings spanned 319 feet 11 inches. On November 2, 1947, with Hughes at the controls in Long Beach harbor, it rose about 25 feet above the water, flew just under half a mile in roughly thirty seconds, and never flew again.
The Piper J-3 Cub was simple, slow, yellow and everywhere. By 1947, when production ended, 19,888 had been built; in 1940 alone the factory turned out 3,016, which at the peak worked out to a new Cub every twenty minutes. Three-quarters of the pilots trained under the Civilian Pilot Training Program learned in Cubs, and many went on to military flying. In the war the Cub went too, as an observation and ambulance airplane nicknamed the Grasshopper.
The Cessna 172 is the airplane flight schools reach for, and what set it apart was the wheel at the front. Cessna took its 170 taildragger, traded the tailwheel for a nosewheel, and let the marketing department name the result: Land-O-Matic. Easy landings made it the airplane people learn in. Textron Aviation still builds Skyhawks and places new ones with flight schools and universities; it marked the design's seventieth year in 2025 and calls it the most popular aircraft in aviation history.
8The hump is there because Boeing expected to be wrong
On the tile: Boeing 7471965-1969
When the 747 was conceived in 1965, Pan Am's Juan Trippe believed big subsonic jets would end their days hauling freight while supersonic airliners took the passengers. Trippe was one of Boeing's best customers, so the 747 was designed to convert: the flight deck went above the cabin, leaving the nose free to hinge upward for a cargo door. The first hump was a hemisphere, which made too much drag, so Boeing stretched it into a teardrop and put a lounge inside.
Concorde cruised at twice the speed of sound between 55,000 and 60,000 feet, where the outside air sat below minus 56 degrees Celsius while friction heated the aluminum skin past 120. Metal expands when it is hot, so the airframe stretched about eight inches in cruise. Passengers felt the effect indirectly: the inside of the cabin window grew warm to the touch. The Atlantic crossing took under four hours, half what an ordinary jet needed.
William Randolph Hearst offered 50,000 dollars for the first flight across the United States in thirty days or less. Cal Rodgers left Sheepshead Bay, New York, on September 17, 1911, in a Wright biplane painted with the name of the grape soda paying his bills. The thirty days ran out while he was still in Missouri. He kept going anyway, crashing and repairing the whole way, and by the time he reached the Pacific almost nothing of the original airplane was left.
2They crossed the Atlantic eight years before Lindbergh
On the tile: Alcock & Brown1919
John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland on June 14 and 15, 1919, the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic by air. It took about sixteen hours through fog, bad weather and mechanical trouble, and the Daily Mail paid them 10,000 pounds. The landing was less dignified. They came down in a bog near Clifden, County Galway, and the Vimy stood on its nose. Neither man was hurt.
In August 1929 the airship Graf Zeppelin circled the globe under Hugo Eckener, with twenty passengers in the gondola and more than forty crew inside the hull. The route ran from Lakehurst, New Jersey, by way of Friedrichshafen, Tokyo and California and back, about 20,000 miles, with roughly twelve days actually in the air over a three-week voyage. William Randolph Hearst paid 100,000 dollars for English-language story rights and insisted the journey begin and end on American soil.
Amy Johnson worked as a legal secretary in London and had earned her pilot's license in July 1929, after nineteen hours in the air. On May 5, 1930, she left Croydon Airport in a secondhand Gipsy Moth biplane she had named Jason. She landed at Darwin on May 24, about 11,000 miles and three continents later, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.
5Four bailouts before the flight that made him famous
On the tile: Lucky Lindy1925-1926
Before the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh was an Army cadet and then an airmail pilot on the St. Louis to Chicago run, and he jumped out of four airplanes. The first was a midair collision at Kelly Field in March 1925. The second was a spin he could not recover, at about 350 feet. The last two were mail flights in 1926: out of fuel in September, lost in fog near Covell, Illinois, in November. No one before him had survived four emergency jumps.
Nobody knew what shape would fly well past the speed of sound, so Bell copied one that already did: the X-1's fuselage was patterned on a .50-caliber machine gun bullet. It was air-launched. A B-29 carried it to about 23,000 feet and dropped it, and a 6,000-pound-thrust rocket did the rest. On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager reached Mach 1.06, around 700 miles per hour, at 43,000 feet. The X-1 flew 78 times in all.
In 1976 one Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird held level flight at 85,069 feet, a record for sustained altitude, and the same day another flew a measured course at 2,193 miles per hour, about Mach 3.3. The Smithsonian still describes the SR-71 as the fastest jet aircraft in the world. Designed at Lockheed's Skunk Works under Kelly Johnson, it could survey 100,000 square miles of ground in a single hour.
Voyager left Edwards Air Force Base on December 14, 1986, so heavy with fuel that both wingtips dragged along the runway and damaged the winglets, which the crew shook loose once airborne. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager took turns in a cabin about two feet wide and seven and a half feet long. They came back nine days later, 24,986 miles without a stop or a refueling, in 216 hours, 3 minutes and 44 seconds. They landed with 106 pounds of fuel.
Auguste Piccard designed the pressurized gondola that carried him into the stratosphere in 1931. His son Jacques took a bathyscaphe to the deepest point in the ocean. On March 1, 1999, his grandson Bertrand lifted off from a Swiss village with Brian Jones in a balloon named Breitling Orbiter 3, and came down in the Egyptian desert 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes later, having flown 25,361 miles nonstop around the world.
The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line opened on January 1, 1914, flying a Benoist airboat across the bay in about twenty-three minutes. The same trip took twelve hours by train. The seat on the first flight was auctioned and went for 400 dollars to Abram Pheil, a former mayor of St. Petersburg, and the airline gave the money to the city for harbor lights. Tony Jannus flew it. The last flight came in May, after the winter visitors went home.
On May 15, 1918, with President Wilson watching, Lieutenant George Boyle was to carry the first United States airmail from Washington to Philadelphia. The engine would not start, because nobody had put fuel in it. Once airborne, Boyle followed the wrong railroad tracks and flew southeast instead of north, coming down in a field at Waldorf, Maryland, about twenty miles from where he had started. The airplane nosed over. The mail went north the next day.
3She wanted to fly the airplane, so she invented a job
On the tile: Ellen Church1930
Ellen Church was a registered nurse and a licensed pilot. When Boeing Air Transport turned down her application to fly for them, on the grounds that it hired only male pilots, she argued that nurses in the cabin would settle nervous passengers. They gave her a three-month trial and had her recruit and train seven more. On May 15, 1930, she flew San Francisco to Chicago on a Boeing 80A with fourteen passengers and thirteen stops, and the job of flight attendant existed.
Frank Whittle was granted a British patent for a turbojet in 1930 and spent years failing to interest the Air Ministry. In Germany, Hans von Ohain patented his own design in 1935, nine days after finishing his doctorate, working out his ideas alone rather than building on anyone else's; Whittle knew nothing of him. Von Ohain's engine flew first, in the Heinkel He 178 on August 27, 1939. Whittle's followed in the Gloster E.28/39 on May 15, 1941. The two men met many times after the war, and each applauded the other.
The de Havilland Comet entered service with BOAC on May 2, 1952, the first jet airliner, carrying thirty-six passengers at a cruising speed of 450 miles per hour. Then Comets began coming apart in flight. Investigators submerged an entire fuselage in a water tank and pumped the pressure up and down to simulate thousands of flights. It split at the corner of a squarish hatch window: the sharp corners were concentrating stress, and the metal fatigued there. Airliner windows have been rounded ever since.
6He filed a flight plan for California, landed in Ireland
On the tile: Corrigan1938
Douglas Corrigan helped build Lindbergh's airplane as a young mechanic at Ryan, and afterward he wanted an ocean crossing of his own. Officials kept refusing him, saying his rebuilt airplane was not safe enough. On July 17, 1938, he took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on a flight plan to California, flew east for twenty-eight hours, and landed outside Dublin. He blamed his compass. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade, and the authorities suspended his license for two weeks.
7He rolled the prototype jetliner over a boat race
On the tile: Tex Johnston1955
Boeing's president brought potential airline customers to the Seafair hydroplane races on Lake Washington in August 1955 to see the Dash 80, the prototype behind the 707, fly past. Test pilot Tex Johnston rolled it instead, twice, low and fast over the water. William Allen, the Boeing president, turned to a guest with a heart condition and asked whether he could borrow his pills. The customers were impressed, and orders for the 707 followed.
8The flight recorder began as one man's side project
On the tile: Black box1950s
David Warren was a research scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Melbourne when he sat in on the inquiry into the Comet crashes. What struck him was how little anyone knew, because the people who could have explained it had been aboard. He remembered a miniature recorder he had seen at a trade fair, and built a demonstration model in his own time that stored four hours of speech and instrument readings. Australia was not interested. Britain was.
9A jetliner ran out of fuel and landed on a drag strip
On the tile: Gimli Glider1983
Air Canada's new Boeing 767 was among the first in the fleet to measure fuel in metric units while the airline's habits were still imperial, and on July 23, 1983, the arithmetic went wrong. Flight 143 left Montreal for Edmonton with about half the fuel it needed. Both engines quit at 41,000 feet. One of the pilots flew gliders, which is what the 767 had become, and he put it down at a closed air force base at Gimli, Manitoba, where the runway was hosting a race. Everyone aboard survived.