What do you get when you take a gifted aeronautical engineering professor, a group of eager junior college students, and mix in a Howard Hughes connection? The result is a streamlined and efficient retractable gear monoplane, the Harlow PJC. The equal...
The story goes that if you want to make a small fortune in aviation, start with a large fortune. Or, in the case of aircraft designers Ben Anderson and Marvin Greenwood, start out as a successful manufacturer of industrial equipment. Then...
The Custer CCW-5 Channel Wing might best be described as a successful failure. As we have often seen, the search for truly breakthrough aircraft designs can be a challenging one. Many fail, a few succeed, and for so many, it is...
With the introduction of the Cirrus SR22T in 2010, general aviation had a truly modern, high-flying, personal airplane that could fly at over 200 mph and make reliable long-distance travel a reality for the single-engine piston set. However, if we turn...
When we think about composite materials in production airplanes, the name Piper Aircraft does not come immediately to mind. The Cirrus and Diamond series, products of the late 1990s, demonstrated that composite airframes could achieve both production and market success. In...
During the early years of the jet age, between the end of World War II and the swinging ’60s, there were very few new ideas that were not worth a try. While today’s latest jet fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning...
In the film Back to the Future II, the antagonist Biff Tannen steals a sports almanac containing scores from every major sporting event over a 50-year time span and delivers it to his younger self via a time machine. Armed with...
