Free Republic

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was seen at the controls of one of the Korean People's Air Force Antonov An-2 aircraft while on an inspection visit to an aircraft maintenance plant last week, and analysts in South Korea say that Pyongyang has updated the colour scheme of the vintage planes, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reports.

Explanation: From January 11 to February 25 2013, a pinhole camera sat in a field near Budapest, Hungary, planet Earth to create this intriguing solargraph. And for 45 days, an old Antonov An-2 biplane stood still while the Sun rose and set. The camera's continuous exposure began about 20 days after the northern hemispere's winter solstice, so each day the Sun's trail arcs steadily higher through the sky. These days in the Sun were recorded on a piece of black and white photosensitive paper tucked in to the simple plastic film container. The long exposure produced a visible color image...

A 77-year-old civilian pilot who had flown planes since he was a teenager was killed when he crashed his biplane Sunday while performing a low-to-the-ground stunt maneuver during an air show at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, authorities said. Officials said Eddie Andreini of Half Moon Bay was piloting the Stearman biplane when it crashed in an open field away from spectators at 2:05 p.m. Black smoke rose from the wreckage as the tens of thousands of people who had flocked to the "Thunder Over Solano" show were evacuated from the base.

In retrospect, the Concorde was doomed from the start. Besides being fuel-hungry, the legendary supersonic jet created sonic booms that were simply too loud for comfort, which prevented the aircraft from flying lucrative overland routes, such as New York to Los Angeles, and kept it an expensive luxury. More than a decade after Concorde was retired, researchers are investigating new ways to build supersonic aircraft by going back to an old idea: the biplane. New research, most recently from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows promise for solving both major challenges to supersonic transports—cost and noise—by turning to this configuration...

LONDON - The pilot of a vintage biplane says he ran into an unusual hazard while making an emergency landing — a cow. Rob Wotton says he was trying to land his World War II-era Tiger Moth after the engine stalled just after takeoff southwest of London on Sept. 14. He was about to touch down in a field when the animal wandered into his way.

When the big Boeing biplane lifts off from Felts Field Saturday afternoon, its open cockpit and wood-paneled passenger cabin will carry the history of American aviation back into the skies. It will fly again after nearly 70 years on a mountainside, a few years in a horse trailer, and nine years in a hangar at Felts, where some 61 volunteers spent about 18,000 hours meticulously restoring it to life. “It’s damn near a miracle,” said Mike Lavelle, an employee of the Boeing Museum of Flight, who has researched this type of plane, the 40-C, and its key importance to American...

CANBERRA: The origin of powered flight in modern birds was in biplane-like dinosaurs living in trees 125 million years ago, according to a new U.S. and Canadian study. "The origin of avian flight has been debated for a century," said co-author Sankar Charterjee from Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, USA. His team claim to have finally settled the long-standing debate, discovering that powered flight developed from dinosaurs that glided down from trees, rather than taking off from the ground. The team, who reported their results today in the U.S. journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, studied fossils...