Windows of Flight: Weekly Aviation History

The history of aviation is full of doors quietly opening — moments that didn't make front-page headlines at the time but changed everything that came after. The second week of July gives us three of them, spanning exactly forty years. We start on July 8th, 1908, in Milan, Italy, where a French sculptor named Thérèse Peltier watched an exhibition flight and simply asked if she could go up. She beca...

The history of aviation is written in moments of brilliant achievement and sudden silence. The first week of July gives us both — two milestones on Independence Day twenty years apart, and one disappearance that the world has never stopped trying to explain. We start on July 4th, 1908, in a grape-growing town in upstate New York, where a motorcycle racer named Glenn Curtiss flew a fragile biplane...

WINDOWS OF FLIGHTEpisode Summary: The Fourth Week of June The history of aviation is full of moments when human beings looked at something that had never been done and decided to do it anyway. The fourth week of June gives us three of them — a floating hotel with mahogany paneling that became the world's first airline, two Army lieutenants who threaded a needle across the Pacific by sextant an...

The history of aviation is not just the history of aircraft. It is the history of the people who fought their way into the sky against every obstacle that stood between them and the horizon. The third week of June belongs entirely to three women who were told, in one way or another, that aviation wasn't for them — and who went anyway. We start on June 15th, 1921, in a small coastal town in norther...

The history of aviation is built on two things in equal measure: the courage to attempt the impossible, and the determination to make the impossible ordinary. The second week of June gives us both — a flying washboard that convinced a nation to trust the airplane, and two men who crossed the North Atlantic in an open cockpit, nearly died several times, and landed nose-first in an Irish bog. We sta...

The history of aviation didn't begin with the Wright brothers. It began in a smoky marketplace in southern France, on a June morning in 1783, when two brothers who made paper for a living let go of some ropes and changed the world's understanding of what was possible. This week we go back to that morning — and then follow the thread forward through 129 years of human beings finding new and increas...

The history of aviation is full of men and women who looked at the sky and refused to accept what was possible yesterday as the limit of what was possible today. The fourth week of May gives us two stories that sit at the very heart of that history — and both of them are about wanting more than you have, and going after it anyway. The first takes us to Huffman Prairie, Ohio, on May 25th, 1910. For...

The third week of May spans nine remarkable years in aviation history — and every one of them involves the Atlantic Ocean, a desperate gamble, and someone refusing to quit. We start on May 15th, 1918, when the United States Post Office launched its first regular airmail service with a presidential send-off, a crowd of dignitaries — and a pilot who flew twenty miles in the wrong direction. Lieutena...