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We told you all about electromagnetic catapults in this story from January 2007. Now the first airplane has been launched with an EMALS system: an F/A-18E Super Hornet, at a Navy test site in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Proceed direct to National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The 1980 movie, “Airplane!” is one of 25 films judged to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant and therefore added to the Film Registry in 2010. The spoof of 1957′s “Zero Hour” was named number 10 on the American Film Institute’s 100 top comedies; it was number 2 on Britain’s 50 Greatest Comedy Films Channel 4 poll, where “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” took top honors. The film marked a rebirth of Leslie Nielsen as a superb physical comedian, and was the last film in which Ethel Merman appeared.

Bar Bets trivia: Which religious zealot panning for cash in the terminal later starred in a season of “24″?

(Gregory Itzin, as the nefarious President Charles Logan)

Courtesy NASM.

For 27 years, the Concorde carried passengers across the Atlantic Ocean at twice the speed of sound, on the very edge of space. A flight from New York to London took a mere 3 ½ hours; the supersonic aircraft flew so high and so fast that American spyplanes were ordered to stay out of the Concorde’s way.

“It symbolized optimism; it was everything the 20^th century could have stood for,” says Sir Terence Conran, one of the Concorde’s designers, in “Concorde: Flying Supersonic,” a Smithsonian Channel film.

This terrific film chronicles the race, begun during the cold war, to develop a supersonic airliner. When President John F. Kennedy called for the United States to develop an aircraft that could fly at twice the speed of sound, Boeing optimistically replied that it would design an aircraft that could take 200 passengers aloft and travel at Mach 3. (This never happened; as the Concorde’s costs rose to $2 billion—$20 billion in today’s dollars—Boeing turned instead to the jumbo jet, developing the 747.)

The Soviet’s Tupolev Tu-144 prototype was the first supersonic transport in the air. But the Soviets abandoned their efforts after the airplane crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973, killing six crewmembers and eight people on the ground. After the accident, the aircraft was relegated to delivering mail; it completed just 55 passenger flights.

It took an Anglo-French alliance to develop the Concorde. On March 2, 1969, the Concorde made its maiden flight. “Our flight plan was not ambitious,” says chief test pilot André Turcat in the film. “It was simply to show it could fly.” Eight months later Turcat would take the aircraft supersonic.

Photograph by Eric Long, courtesy NASM.

The Concorde overcame a host of obstacles—high development costs, steep operating costs, and public opposition to the sonic boom. According to the film, thousands of Britons complained about the noise; one woman even alleged that the booms had made her pregnant, by interrupting her rhythm method of contraception.

By the mid-1970s, Concordes were rolling off the production lines, but without a single buyer. The French and British finally approached their own national airlines. Says Lord Heseltine, Minister for Aerospace from 1972-1974, “I had to deal with British Airways, and there’s not the slightest doubt they screwed me to the floorboards.”

The graceful airliner would go on to become the principal transport for the world’s elite. Tune in to the Smithsonian Channel to see what ultimately grounded the Concorde.

“Concorde: Flying Supersonic” will next air on Tuesday, December 28 at 8 and 11 p.m. It is also available on demand.

Mrs. David Simpson then...

Every December 17, National Air and Space Museum senior curator Tom Crouch attends the annual wreath-laying ceremony in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, to mark the anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. This year I tagged along. Our first stop was the Outer Banks History Center in nearby Manteo, where curator and archivist KaeLi Schurr treated us to a tour of the library and archive.

An inveterate researcher, Crouch is always on high alert for new findings about early aviation. I dove into the boxes of archival photographs, looking for buried treasure. There were many well-known images of the Flyer on the dunes, the usual stuff. Then I struck gold when I pulled out a photo of an elegantly dressed petite woman in a stylish cloche hat, laying flowers at the Wright Brothers National Memorial sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, from the look of the photo. Who was she? Schurr, the go-to gal for Outer Banks history, didn’t know.

...and now. (Archival photo David Stick Collection #1588D8)

At the Wright Memorial early the next morning, after the wreath ceremony and flyover, we headed in for a luncheon. Schurr appeared, with a Xerox of the print that had captivated me—complete with the woman’s name, Mrs. David Simpson. Turns out she is the granddaughter of Adam Etheridge, a witness to the December 17, 1903 flight. I searched out Lois Smith, another descendant of one of the witnesses, whose grandfather John T. Daniels took the iconic first-flight photo. “Do you know this name?” I asked. “Is this woman still alive?” I held out little hope.

“Why, she was here a moment ago, but she just left,” Smith said. What a disappointment. I had missed her by seconds.

Moments later, as the crowd dispersed, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Said Mrs. David Simpson, “Are you looking for me?” She had never seen the photograph before. Although she was about to leave, she walked back over to the memorial, where I snapped another picture. A magic moment, where the past and future come together, and I was fortunate to be a witness.

Caroline Sheen is the Photography and Illustrations Editor at Air & Space.

Photo: Roskosmos

I was surprised by these photos, but I shouldn’t have been.

Most pictures of Russian space crews in the Soyuz TMA vehicle show them squished together like sardines, sitting side by side on their launch “couches.” I’ve always wondered how they can move their arms, let alone get anything done, during the two-day journey from Earth to the space station.

Photo: Roskosmos

Of course I should have realized that once in space, they move out to the roomier orbital module of the three-part vehicle —as you can see in these photos taken by TMA-20 commander Dmitry Kondratiev. According to the Russian space agency Roskosmos, these are the first such pictures to be posted on the Internet.