Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
A hugely successful airborne humanitarian mission in Ethiopia resulted in the establishment of a new and still-intact flight record. Operation Solomon was an Israeli military effort to airlift thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel within a tight timeframe. At the time, Ethiopia was in grave danger of political destabilization as the government of Mengistu Aile... Continue Reading →
A fuzzy, many-generations-old photo of Shigeru Serikaku in front of his plane is one of the few images remaining of the adventurous issei from Sashiki, Okinawa. (Courtesy of the Serikaku family, via The Hawaii Herald) As a 13-year-old boy growing up on the Japanese island of Okinawa, Shigeru Serikaku (1890-1971) learned about how the Wright... Continue Reading →
Polish aviation pioneer Tadeusz Góra made a record-setting flight of 359 miles in a PWS-101 glider (an unpowered aircraft dependent on air currents to stay airborne) between the village of Bezmiechowa Górna in southeastern Poland and the city of Šalčininkai in southeastern Lithuania. As a result of this achievement, Góra became the first-ever recipient of... Continue Reading →
Michael A. Chowdry was a Pakistani-American who combined a strong enthusiasm for flying with his entrepreneurial talents to become a major force in the aviation industry. Chowdry, who was born in Pakistan in 1954, moved to the United States in 1976. He graduated from the University of Minnesota Crookston in 1978 with a degree in... Continue Reading →
Leah Hing, who was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1907, achieved a historic record in 1934 when she became the first U.S.-born Chinese-American woman to earn her airplane pilot’s license. While the better known Katherine Sui Fun Cheung obtained her own airplane pilot’s license about two years earlier, she had been born in China and... Continue Reading →
During World War II, a large number of Chinese-American women made important contributions to the United States’ efforts in the fight against the Axis powers. A key example of these contributions, many of which centered on transportation, involved Los Angeles’ Chinatown branch of the American Women’s Voluntary Services (AWVS) throughout the war years. AWVS, which... Continue Reading →
In New Zealand, aviation pioneer George B. Bolt inaugurated the first regular airmail service between the cities of Auckland and Whangarei. This venture marked only the latest of his major contributions to airborne transportation in his homeland. Bolt, who had been born in the city of Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island in 1893, developed... Continue Reading →
Engineer and helicopter designer Étienne Edmond Oehmichen established a new aviation record in his native France. He did so by flying his helicopter Oehmichen No. 2, which he had designed and built a couple of years earlier, around a triangular closed circuit of approximately six-tenths of a mile. This flight took seven minutes and 40... Continue Reading →
A pioneering aviation event in England came to an end when Louis Paulhan finished first in a two-man London-to-Manchester plane race. The French aviator landed in Manchester early in the morning after he had begun his 186-mile flight from London. His competitor, an Englishman named Claude Grahame-White, had been hampered by everything from engine problems... Continue Reading →
Jan Smuts International Airport began operations in the city of Kempton Park, 20 miles northeast of Johannesburg, in what was then the Union of South Africa. (The Republic of South Africa came into existence nine years later.) The South African Airways’ Skymaster plane named Tafelberg was the first aircraft to touch down at the new... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 