Recently in Anniversary Category

To celebrate 30 years of flights to London Heathrow, American Airlines has released this tremendous, nay, glorious image of members of staff dating from 1988. I think it's probably the hair - just the wrong side of boufant - that does it for us. As to whether the jet is still in service, well, it's American, so who knows...

Credit: American Airlines

Boeing celebrated the 20th aniversary of the first flight of its venerable C-17 airlifter on 15 September with this recreation of the event over Long Beach, California using aircraft T1.

Credit: Boeing

A Spitfire and a Hurricane provided the soundtrack to actor Robert Hardy's reading of the famous speech by the then prime minister Winston Churchill on Friday 20 August.

War veterans gathered in Whitehall, Westminster for the event commemorating 70 years since the Battle of Britain.

To mark the anniversary, the speech will be replayed outside Churchill's war-time bunker in Whitehall, at 1552 BST - precisely 70 years since Churchill stood up to give the address in Parliament.

More on the Battle of Britain

Picture credit: Rex Features/Gavin Rodgers

Burlesque star Dita Von Teese helped Sir Richard Branson celebrate Virgin Atlantic's 10th anniversary of flying to Las Vegas.

Dita has been immortalised as a one-off Las Vegas-inspired flying lady on the nose of a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747-400.

Dita and Sir Richard posed for pictures at Las Vegas McCarran Airport yesterday.

See the videos below. The first includes Sir Richard Branson

 

  

• Virgin Atlantic's facebook group
• Runway Girl blog post: VIDEO: Virgin Atlantic reveals in-flight connectivity plan

 

Gulf Air celebrated its 60th birthday on 24 March 2010.  

Here at Flightglobal, we've gone and got all excited about the Boeing 747's 40th anniversary in commercial service. The 747's launch customer was Pan Am. See more of our 747@40 coverage and find out how you can download this image for free.

Cessna is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the maiden flight of the Citation. This is how Flight reported the event at the time: "Cessna flew the Fanjet 500 business jet for the first time on September 15 and promptly renamed it the Citation. "Also announced was a major revision of all performance, weight, dimension and price data from that which was first revealed a year ago. "The name Fanjet has been dropped because Cessna considers that the majority of business jets will be turbofan powered by the 1970s. "The Citation is the first of the new generation of mini business- jets powered by...." continue reading....

The Bristol Brabazon performed its maiden flight 60 years ago today.

Here is a profile page that aggregates all Flightglobal's content on the aircraft which includes pages in our pdf archive, cutaway images, black and white images, a video uploaded to Youtube showing the aircraft at Farnborough Air Show in 1950.

PDF archive finds on the Brabazon...

A comprehensive appraisal of the Bristol Brabazon, "Britain's greatest airliner" including cutaway drawings (1945)

Brabazon progress (1950)

 

One hundred years ago today Louis Blériot became the first person to cross a 'large body of water' in a 'heavier than air' aircraft.

The successful aircraft was the Blériot XI, a replica of which an AirSpace user recently captured.

Blériot flew 22 statute miles (36.6 km) from Les Barraques (near Calais, France) to Dover, England (landing at Northfall Meadow). The trip took 37 minutes. The challenge was backed by a £1,000 prize from the Daily Mail.

Some interesting tidbits from the Flight archive:

Leading dimensions of the XI were: span, 28ft.; chord, 6ft.; length, 25ft.; all-up weight, 715 lb ; wing loading, 3.9 lb/sq.ft. Control was by wing-warping, an orthodox rudder, and "elevating tips" at the tailplane ends. Its 24 h.p. "fan-type" three-cylinder air-cooled Anzani engine had automatic inlet valves and mechanical exhaust valves supplemented by auxiliary exhaust ports. The crossing was made at a speed of about 45 m.p.h., in a wind of variable direction which blew initially at about l0kt, fell light in mid-Channel (where the pilot was out of sight of land to 20kt at Dover).
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1949/1949%20-%201307.html?search=wing%20loading,%203J9%20lb/sq.ft

Going into the competition, Blériot had a large share of naysayers. He entered the competition injured (during a test flight in his VIII craft, a gasoline line broke and left him with a burnt foot). Flight reported that observers "reckoned he was only going to make a short trial flight, and that the wind would prove too much for him."

Bleriot reported in a telegram to the Washington Post that he throttled his engine to 1,200 revolutions per minute, almost the top speed of the engine, to clear telegraph wires at the edge of the cliff near the runway field at Les Barraques. Then he lowered the engine speed to give the XI an average airspeed of approximately 40 miles per hour (64 kilometers per hour) and an altitude of about 250 feet (76 m).

Upon reaching England, Flight reported, "A decidedly worried-looking Customs officer had appeared on the scene, complete with a big batch of official forms. He wanted to make certain Bleriot had not brought any contraband goods across the Channel with him by air, and among the forms the airman was called upon to sign was one to the effect that his 'vessel', of which he was described as the 'master', was free from anything in the nature of infectious disease.

The XI was put on display after its flight and 120,000 people visited it over the course of four days.

On the 40th anniversary of the flight, Flight's Harry Harper poignantly wrote:

Such a great pioneer as Bleriot, though he realized well enough the grim possibilities the air conquest might open up, told me he was confident in his own mind that the ability to travel through the air at speeds impossible by land and sea would, in the end, prove a boon rather than a menace to mankind

40 years ago today Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, completing its historical mission.

Time to celebrate, right?

Unfortunately not.

Out of fear of astronauts bringing "unheard-of" diseases back to Earth, US public authorities imposed a 21-day quarantine on all returning astronauts. They were confined to the "Lunar Receiving Laboratory" in Houston that featured, amongst other novelties, a glass wall so the astronauts could see family members.


From Flight's archive:

So that there can be no possibility of US astronauts returning o m the Moon bringing with them unheard-of diseases which might spread disastrously through mankind, the astronauts spend their first 18 days back on Earth in a hermetically led, super-sterile building called the Lunar Receiving aboratory (see photograph in Flight for December 14, page 1010 ) at the Manned Spacecraft Centre, Houston, Texas. This building is so designed that no single germ can escape once Apollo astronauts have been sealed inside.

US public health authorities have imposed a 21-day quarantine on astronauts returning from Moon flights, and a special group of doctors, biologists and agricultural experts known as the Inter-agency Back-up Committee on Contamination has been set up to work out foolproof measures to prevent mishap from occurring.

The quarantine period will not be as arduous for the astronauts as it sounds, for the Lunar Receiving Laboratory is equipped to give them all the comforts of a luxurious setting; in one wall is a thick plate-glass window through which astronauts will be able to talk to their wives and children. But every molecule of air leaving the white three-storey bulilding will first be incinerated and passed through ultra-fine filters. All other waste will be stored in leakproof containers for before being strongly disinfected then burned.

Dr Walter Kemmerer, chief of MSC's Biochemical Special-Services Branch, says that "the probability of life existing on the lunar surface is extremely small. The environment there, the temperature, the absence of free water, the radiation--all of these things make us believe that life is unlikely to exist on Moon.

"But we cannot definitely or with absolute certainty say that does not. So we must take precautions."