Airplanes

In 1949, a shocking mid-air crash near National Airport killed more people than any previous air disaster in U.S. history. It did not take long for investigators to place the blame on one unlucky pilot. But was Capt. Erick Rios Bridoux really at fault?

When word came from Paris that Charles Lindbergh successfully completed the first trans-Atlantic flight on May 21, 1927, the world celebrated. Overnight the young pilot became a household name and hero. Cities around the globe prepared to fete him. But to Lindbergh, one greeting stood out in particular, “Paris was marvelous and London and Brussels as well, and I wouldn’t for the world draw any comparisons, but I will say this, the Washington reception was the best handled of all.”

Ohio and North Carolina often get into a dispute about who can “claim” the Wright Brothers. The former was where the two lived and conducted most of their research, but the latter was where they actually took to the air for the first time. The debate rages on, with shots fired in forms from commemorative coins to license plates. But the place where the Wright Brothers really fathered the American aviation age was right here in the DC area, where they taught the first military pilots to fly, proved to the American public that their machine was real, and took to the air at what is now the oldest airport in the world.

In 1903, just weeks before Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew their Wright flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley launched a daring, government-backed attempt to fly a motorized craft off a houseboat in the Potomac River. Langley's Aerodrome promptly crashed, but — much to the Wright Brothers' dismay — that didn't stop the Smithsonian from crediting Langley with creating the first motorized, manned craft “capable of flight.”