From a twelve-second flight on a windy North Carolina beach to supersonic passenger travel, these are the moments that turned aviation from a dream into the safest way to cross the planet.
Attempting to circle the globe by air near the equator, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished near Howland Island. No confirmed wreckage has ever been recovered, and eighty-nine years later, a Purdue-led expedition is still actively searching for the wreck.
Read our full case file →A Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart lost cabin pressure climbing out of Orlando and stopped answering. F-16s intercepted it in relays across the country and reported frost on the inside of the cockpit glass and nobody moving. It flew nearly four hours on autopilot, live on national television, before the fuel ran out over South Dakota.
Read our full case file →Built in secret by Lockheed's Skunk Works in roughly 88 days, the U-2 made its first flight unintentionally, lifting off during a taxi test at a secret Nevada test site that would become known as Area 51. The CIA has since confirmed it caused more than half of America's UFO reports.
Read our full case file →Two Boeing 747s collided on a fog-covered runway, killing 583 people in the deadliest accident in aviation history. The tragedy directly led to standardized aviation English phraseology and modern Crew Resource Management.
Read our full case file →A fan blade broke in the left engine of a two-month-old Boeing 737-400. The crew shut down the right one. Passengers who could see flames on the left never told them, because everyone assumed the flight deck already knew. Kegworth is the accident that put cabin crew into crew resource management training across the industry, and changed how engine instruments are designed.
Read our full case file →US Air Force security police at a NATO base in rural England reported a craft in the forest outside their fence over three nights. Deputy base commander Lt Col Charles Halt personally investigated and recorded eighteen minutes on a pocket tape recorder, since declassified.
Read our full case file →A Boeing 747's rear pressure bulkhead, repaired incorrectly seven years earlier, failed twelve minutes after takeoff from Tokyo. The crew fought for 32 minutes using only engine thrust. 520 of 524 people aboard died.
Read our full case file →A bomb hidden inside a radio cassette player exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 at 31,000 feet, killing all 259 people aboard, including 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas, and 11 more residents on the ground.
Read our full case file →From the Wright Flyer to classified hypersonic prototypes, The Evolution of Flight traces every aircraft that changed the game, including the secret Skunk Works spy planes behind decades of UFO reports.
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