Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
Elio Morillo, an aerospace engineer, was born in Ecuador. His interest in becoming an engineer took shape after he and his mother immigrated to New York City. Morillo found himself especially mesmerized in his younger years by TV footage of jets, spacecraft, and other types of flight technology. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in mechanical... Continue Reading →
May 20, 1946 Jacob Ellehammer, a longtime watchmaker who also used his mechanical talents to make seminal contributions to transportation, died in Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen. He was 74. Ellehammer was born in the Danish village of Bakkebølle on June 14, 1871. After completing his apprenticeship as a watchmaker, he moved to Copenhagen and... Continue Reading →
May 14, 2005 French pilot Didier Delsalle (born in 1957) became the first and to date only person to land a helicopter on top of Mount Everest. With an elevation of 29,030 feet (8,848 meters), Mount Everest -- located at the border between Nepal and Tibet in the Himalayas -- is Earth’s highest mountain above... Continue Reading →
On April 19, 2021, the autonomous NASA helicopter Ingenuity (nicknamed Ginny) lifted off the surface of Mars for what turned out to be a flight of 39.1 seconds. While decidedly brief, this ascent was also historic because it made Ingenuity the first aircraft to carry out a powered, controlled extra-terrestrial flight. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory... Continue Reading →
In 2010, La’Shanda R. Holmes Hawkins became the first African American female helicopter pilot in the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). As an officer in that uniformed service, she has amassed more than 2,000 flight hours while helping to carry out search-and-rescue missions; law enforcement operations; and various other duties. Hawkins, who was born in... Continue Reading →
As a soldier in the Massachusetts National Guard (the Bay State’s component of the U.S. Army National Guard), Marisol A. Chalas achieved an aviation milestone by becoming the first Latina in the entire National Guard to pilot a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. (That longtime four-blade, twin-engine utility helicopter is manufactured for the Army by the... Continue Reading →
Swati Mohan is an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research and development center that is based in Pasadena, California, and managed by the California Institute of Technology. Since 2013, she has been significantly involved in the Mars 2020 mission. A large part of this mission has entailed dispatching both the rover... Continue Reading →
Mara Huling Langevin made history as the first Asian American female -- as well as the first female of any minority -- to become a U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) aviator. “I never thought about being the first of anything,” she said in a 2021 interview with the USCG’s news service MyCG. “All I wanted to... Continue Reading →
July 12, 1957 Dwight D. Eisenhower made transportation history when he became the first U.S. president to fly in a helicopter. This aviation “first” occurred after he went on board a Bell H-13J helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House. This helicopter had been purchased by the U.S. Air Force, and it was piloted... Continue Reading →
April 15, 1941 Aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky set a new record when he made the first helicopter flight in the United States as well as the entire Western Hemisphere that lasted more than an hour. He flew a Vought-Sikorsky VS-300 helicopter in the skies above his factory in Stratford, Connecticut, and managed to keep that aircraft... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 