The ring wing or annular airfoil is an aircraft design which has been experimented with throughout the history of aviation with some interesting variations. It has served as the inspiration for several paper airplane designs, model airplanes of course, and a variety of children's toys. The capabilities imagined by the French coléoptère engineers of the 1950's and 1960's and the U.S. "flying tank" designers are available today at least in the form of unmanned vehicles (large PDF brochure, 6 minute video download, 1½ minute YT news clip). The technology has also been adapted to become the surfboard tunnel fin and there are underwater UAVs as well.
posted by XMLicious on Aug 28, 2009 - 14 comments

Ask the Pilot. Columnist Patrick Smith explains why you shouldn't be afraid of flying. [more inside]
posted by lalex on Jun 5, 2009 - 42 comments

Stories that Fly is a citizen media project that features a growing collection of digital stories about general aviation. The stories are contributed by student journalists, aviators, and interested community members and cover regional airports, events, and people in the Ohio aviation community.
posted by netbros on Mar 23, 2009 - 3 comments

Pilot tells of hairy near miss at Las Vegas airport A post on Airliners.net telling, in some detail, of a near miss between an America West Airbus A320 (piloted by the author) and an Air Canada plane at Las Vegas airport. And if that puts you off flying, to calm down, another pilot's account, of a less hair-raising flight.
posted by jontyjago on Jul 30, 2007 - 55 comments

Enplaned Even if you don't care a whit about the airline inductry, this is a great example of how to blog a topic well. [via Joel on Software]
posted by cillit bang on Feb 2, 2006 - 12 comments

Note the champagne boxes. Lots of amazing interior and aerial photos of the new Airbus A380 are up on Airliners.net. It's a huge, huge plane. [There is more inside.]
posted by brownpau on Dec 10, 2005 - 36 comments

Fantasy Planes. Sometimes I think the most interesting airplanes are the ones that never got built
posted by growabrain on Feb 10, 2005 - 7 comments

Aerosite.
posted by hama7 on Dec 29, 2003 - 15 comments

The effects of jet contrails on climate. Taking advantage of a unique research opportunity brought about by the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on America, when all commercial air traffic in the country stood still for three days, scientists have uncovered the first clear evidence. Link to British journal Nature article on subject and IPCC article.
posted by KevinSkomsvold on Aug 8, 2002 - 7 comments

Lockheed Martin beat out Boeing for a $200 Billion contract to build the new F-35 fighters jets earlier today. Missile defense, planes that can take off vertically, bombs that fry electronics...military technology is accelerating at a really frightening pace.
posted by catatonic on Oct 26, 2001 - 36 comments

Malcolm Gladwell on JFK Jr's Crash New from the New Yorker. Actually the article talks mostly about the difference between choking and panicking, mostly in Sports. Still, the discussion about the plane crash is the most fascinating. Perhaps thats because of my morbid fascination with plane crashes:

Chapter 1 of "Inmates Are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper (American Crash in Cali, Colombia).... Bruce Tognazzini on Interfaces that Kill (John Denver).... The Lessons of ValuJet 592 by the masterful William Langweische.... The same Mr. Langweische has a book called "Inside the Sky: Meditations on Flight" which looks interesting.
posted by lockecito on Sep 26, 2000 - 2 comments