All Stories

This year is the 100^th Anniversary of the Girl Scouts, and on Saturday, June 9^th there will be an estimated 200,000 girls coming to Washington DC for the Girl Scouts Rock the Mall event.  There are many famous women, including First Ladies, a Supreme Court justice, CEOs, and even astronauts who remember their days in Girl Scouting as ones that helped shape their careers.  Most of us know that the Girl Scout organization was designed to empower girls and teach values as well as practical skills.  But did you know that at a time when most women and girls were being told the only job for them in aviation was that of stewardess, the Girl Scouts were offering a program to teach girls to fly airplanes?

The day is Thursday, February 24, 1949; the pens on the automatic plotting boards at South Station are busy tracking the altitude and course of a rocket, which just moments before had been launched from a site three miles away on the test range of the White Sands Proving Ground.

Many older African Americans who grew up in the South painfully remember the time when black passengers had to sit in the back of busses or use separate train compartments; and when train stations and bus terminals provided separate but mostly unequal facilities such as drinking fountains, restrooms, waiting lounges, and eating facilities for black and white passengers.

Curator Dominick Pisano examines the public's fascination with celebrity airplane crashes.

Recently the National Air and Space Museum hosted Kites of Asia Family Day. 

 In the years before the invention of the flight data recorder, the "black box" that records essential flight data, an aircraft accident investigation could occasionally degenerate into a mere finger-pointing exercise, like this one from Russia during World War I — a group of aviation cadets at the Gatchina Military Flying School near Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) point fingers of scorn at a student pilot identified only as "Ivanov" after his less than perfect landing, fortunately injuring only his dignity.

I offer for your consideration, the ten best American aviation genre films in chronological order:

On February 10, 2012, retired Vought employees officially rolled out the one-of-a-kind Vought V-173 Flying Pancake, following eight years of painstaking restoration work. The Flying Pancake dates to World War II when the Chance Vought Division of the United Aircraft Corporation built and flew the airplane to test Charles H. Zimmerman’s theories about extremely low-aspect ratio wing design that allowed an aircraft to fly at very slow speeds. 

The relationship between film, history, and mass culture is especially intriguing when we examine the correspondences between the representation of pilot-heroes in film and public perceptions of aviation. These connections are applicable during the heyday of the aviation genre film—the interwar years and WWII.

I would like to think that I’ve always known the inspirational story of the Tuskegee Airmen—the groundbreaking pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group.