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September 2011

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Features

Draper Lab team members Bobby Cohanim (in black shirt) and Eph Lanford check fittings and connections on TALARIS before running a test.

Leaping Lunar Landers!

Can a spacecraft hop its way to winning the Google Lunar X prize?

Staff Sergeant Michelle Torrey, right, with Master Sergeant Brett Kitzman load an AIM-120 missile onto an F-16.

The Changing of the Guard

Ten years after 9/11, what life is like in an Air National Guard unit.

Special Section: True Grit

Aviation's Stories of Determination

When Calbraith Perry Rodgers took off from New York on September 17, 1911, bound for California, he blazed a sky trail that hundreds of thousands would follow.

First Across the Continent

A 100th anniversary remembrance of Cal Rodgers and the Vin Fiz.

In his flight jacket with 17th Bomb Group patch, Dick Cole looks ready to fly Panchito, a restored B-25J, at a Raider gathering in Punta Gorda, Florida, last March.

The Raiders Remember

In an annual ceremony, the last of the Doolittle Raiders recall their part in victory over Japan.

When seven men got stuck in a grim patch of Greenland in 1948, the Air Force sent a B-17 to rescue them, but it got mired in soft snow (top of montage), only worsening the predicament.

Stranded

Four aircraft, 12 airmen, 25 days, 40 below zero, in the middle of nowhere.

At Amsterdam's Schipol airport in the Netherlands, air traffic controllers oversaw 386,000 takeoffs and landings last year.

Heroes in the Tower

Stories about air traffic controllers that you probably didn’t see on the evening news.

AeroVironment’s Global Observer (in California last year), designed to fly for a week on hydrogen, will triple the endurance of experimental, gas-powered UVAS from the late 1980s.

Distance Runners

Unmanned aerial vehicles redefine the term "nonstop flight."

In 2004, salvagers pulled a Bell P-39 from a Siberian lake, where 60 years earlier pilot Ivan Baranovsky had crash-landed it.

Lieutenant Ivan Baranovsky’s P-39

An airacobra's journey to the eastern front...and back

WASP pilot

The Mobile in Mobilization

The legacy of WWII's Women Airforce Service Pilots

Departments

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Viewport: Across the Country in 49 Days

Viewport: Across the Country in 49 Days

Interview

Raceplane Builder Par Excellence

The Reno Kid, Andy Chiavetta.

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In the Museum: A Fleet’s Final Flight

A civilian flight trainer enters the collections.

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Above & Beyond: Tully’s Astronarium

A high-schooler champions science in America

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Oldies and Oddities: Lying Down on the Job

Piloting in the prone position

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Reviews and Previews: Prodigal Son

A troubled man, Gregory Boyington found redemption commanding a U.S. Marine fighter squadron in the South Pacific

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Moments and Milestones: Once Around

The 75th anniversary of a round-the-world trip.