All Stories

Throughout his career, Museum curator Ron Davies collected everything--tickets, timetables, brochures, photographs, public relations releases, and baggage labels—from airlines around the world from his travels. He encouraged his friends and colleagues to save their materials for him. He wrote to airlines and aircraft manufacturers soliciting information. This material, totaling over 62 cubic feet, became the basis for the R. E. G. (Ron) Davies Air Transport Collection at the National Air and Space Museum Archives.

Marlon D. Green fought and won the right to fly as a pilot for a major U.S. airline.

In the fifties and sixties to get hired as a stewardess put you in a club that was akin to being a movie star. Around this time, a highly qualified woman, top of her training class, beautiful and poised, didn't understand why she wasn't being hired, until an instructor told her it was because she was Black.

For six months in 1964 the US Air Force flew an airplane at supersonic speeds over Oklahoma City, often multiple times a day, in a series of tests called Project Bongo. The story of how and why the tests happened is a wild ride, and we’re breaking it down for you today on AirSpace.

Read a first-hand account of what it was like to fly aboard a Boeing 247 in 1934.

In 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) started passenger service between New York and Los Angeles using a combination of trains and planes.

Over time, Earth was became one connected planet—one global neighborhood.

Although a majority of flight attendants in the 1930s were women, Pan Am and Eastern Air Lines exclusively hired men for the role. These male stewards, who made up one third of the flight attendants across the industry, were sometimes belittled as “interlopers in an already well-established female realm.”

The first episode of our "QueerSpace" limited series spotlights the history and community built by male flight attendants.

In late 1959, the FAA released its “Age 60 Rule,” which essentially required mandatory retirement for airline pilots over age 60. As his 60th birthday rapidly approached, Captain Michael Gitt appealed with an age discrimination lawsuit against Eastern Airlines to help him overturn the age disqualification. Read about his attempt to leverage the new Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA).