You can fly between the Orkney Islands, to the north of Scotland, on what is said to be the world’s shortest scheduled flight… with the trip from Westray Island, to Papa Westray Island, taking about two minutes.

So you think your private jet is the biggest and best? Does it, like the aircraft – known as “The Starship” – that British rockers Led Zeppelin used to traverse the globe in 1973, also have a fireplace though?

“The Starship,” as the former United Airlines Boeing 720 passenger jet was re-dubbed by its owners (Ward Sylvester and pop singer Bobby Sherman) had been modified at the cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars, with the intention of renting it out to touring super-groups. Swivel chairs, a bar, and a 3/4” Sony U-matic videocassette player and TV were installed (The plane’s library contained films ranging from Deep Throat to the Marx Brothers), and a bedroom, for “privacy” was built into the back of the plane. Shag carpeting, champagne, the Starship had it all, even President Nixon’s Air Force One didn’t compare. There were two stewardesses on the plane and it cost $2500 an hour to run.

An oversized paper aeroplane built for The Great Paper Airplane Project, with a length of about fourteen metres and a wingspan of some seven metres, flew just over a kilometre after being launched from a helicopter over the Arizona desert recently.

While an impressive feat, had it have been launched with a little bit more… elbow, I get the feeling it would have flown much further. Perhaps a sling-shot like launch device could be considered for future flights?

US pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart along with her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in 1937 while circumnavigating the world, somewhere in the vicinity of Howland Island, in the central Pacific Ocean.

While a number of theories have been advanced as to what became of Earhart and Noonan, the notion that the pair managed to land their craft, and even survive for a time, on an atoll in the Pacific, has gained a little more traction recently:

Earhart and Noonan, low on fuel and unable to find their next scheduled stopping point – Howland Island – radioed their position, then landed on a reef at uninhabited Gardner Island, a small coral atoll now known as Nikumaroro Island. Using what fuel remained to turn up the engines to recharge the batteries, they continued to radio distress signals for several days until Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra aircraft was swept off the reef by rising tides and surf. Using equipment not available in 1937 – digitized information management systems, antenna modeling software, and radio wave propagation analysis programs, TIGHAR concluded that 57 of the 120 signals reported at the time are credible, triangulating Earhart’s position to have been Nikumaroro Island.

You can learn a lot about the people you are flying with just from the pants they are wearing.

Swim Trunks: Will be escorted off plane by federal air marshal for doing something gross to the beverage cart.

Fourteen year old Werner Franz worked aboard the ill-fated Hindenburg airship as a cabin boy, and made a miraculous escape from the craft’s flame engulfed hull, when it was destroyed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, in New Jersey, as it was attempting to dock on 6 May, 1937.

When the ship finally began to drop down in the front, Franz pulled himself forward and sat on the catwalk next to the hatch. In the red glow of the fire, Franz kicked at the hatch with both feet and knocked it open. Through the hatchway he saw the ground coming quickly toward him. When the ground was only a couple of meters away, Franz jumped. Suddenly, the ship began to rise up above him again as it rebounded off the landing wheel beneath the control car. Franz was therefore given a few seconds in which to run out from under the ship. His first instinct as he jumped had been to run with the wind, but as he landed he saw the flames being blown ahead of him, and immediately turned around and ran into the wind instead. As the Hindenburg’s hull hung momentarily in the air above him, Franz ran as fast as he could toward the port side and just barely got out from underneath the wreck before it crashed to the ground behind him.

Juliane Koepcke, who survived an aircraft crash at age seventeen in 1971, recounts the experience of the accident and fending for herself, alone and wounded, for ten days in the Peruvian rainforest, before being rescued.

I could hear the planes overhead searching for the wreck but it was a very dense forest and I couldn’t see them. I was wearing a very short, sleeveless mini-dress and white sandals. I had lost one shoe but I kept the other because I am very short-sighted and had lost my glasses, so I used that shoe to test the ground ahead of me as I walked. Snakes are camouflaged there and they look like dry leaves. I was lucky I didn’t meet them or maybe just that I didn’t see them.

Supersonic biplanes, or aircraft with dual wings, have been found to dispense with the sonic booms associated with breaking the sound barrier.

Normally, as a conventional jet nears the speed of sound, air starts to compress at the front and back of the jet. As the plane reaches and surpasses the speed of sound, or Mach 1, the sudden increase in air pressure creates two huge shock waves that radiate out at both ends of the plane, producing a sonic boom. Through calculations, Busemann found that a biplane design could essentially do away with shock waves. Each wing of the design, when seen from the side, is shaped like a flattened triangle, with the top and bottom wings pointing toward each other. The configuration, according to his calculations, cancels out shock waves produced by each wing alone.

Photos and floor plans of the passenger and crew decks of the German airship Hindenburg.

Even if the fixtures and fittings were relatively basic, and far from what first class passengers on ocean liners would have been used to, flying by airship must have been quite the way to travel in its day.

Via Kottke.

The pioneers of helicopter flight quite literally flew on a (moving) wing and a prayer, as this collection of film clips, put together by British Pathé, goes to show.