AirSpaceMag.com

U.S. Army Private Derek Hayes patrols Tarmiya, Iraq, 2008. (USAF/Technical Sergeant William Greer.

When U.S. soldiers go into combat, chances are they’re wearing at least 40 pounds of body armor—in addition to the weight of their weapon and ammunition. Typical protective gear worn by most American forces, says Body Armor News, “consists of a vest with a series of inserts that protect most of the upper body from armor-piercing rounds.”

Waist gunner wearing helmet and flak suit in action on a heavy bomber, circa 1944. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That got us wondering about the flak jackets worn by World War II bomber crews to protect them from airborne shrapnel. Turns out, their protective gear was designed by the Air Force in collaboration with—wait for it—medieval armor specialists at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who knew?

Global Security notes that then-Colonel Malcolm Grow, the surgeon for the Eighth Air Force, tallied the wounds received by his units, and determined that 70 percent were caused by low-velocity flak. He decided that light armor would offer the gunners adequate protection.

According to a 1945 article from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (“Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare” by Stephen V. Grancsay), the Air Force consulted the museum’s armor workshop. “The design of Armor Vest M6, which is the latest standardized flyer’s armor, is based on one of the Museum’s brigandines dating from about 1400.” And that’s not all: “The suits of armor in the exhibition halls are constantly studied for suggestions,” wrote Grancsay, “and no type which seems to hold the slightest promise of adaptation is overlooked. Heavy armor for the military sport of jousting, lighter battle armor, shirts of mail, scale armor, and the quilted jackets of renaissance days have all been carefully examined from a new viewpoint.”

Advertising poster for KLM Royal Dutch Air Lines, circa 1938, showing a cross-section of a Fokker-assembled Douglas DC-2. Courtesy NASM.

It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1930s, during the days of luxury air travel, some airlines provided complimentary in-flight cigarettes. Some 40 years later, smokers would become the “new official pariahs,” groused the New Republic, while pointing out that smokers were already “segregated at the back of the plane, where they can cough and wheeze and die slowly among their own kind.”

But smoking was also banned in the early days of air travel. “Carriers had forbidden smoking aboard the earliest airliners,” writes Daniel L. Rust, assistant director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, in his book Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience. Early aircraft—made from wood, canvas, and dope—were highly flammable. It wasn’t until the advent of metal aircraft and enclosed cabins that the rules changed. “Airlines preferred smokers to light up in the forward section of enclosed cabin airliners such as Ford Tri-Motors,” writes Rust. “When windows in the rear and front areas of the cabin were open slightly, cabin air moved from back to front, pulling cigarette smoke from the cabin’s anterior into the airplane’s slipstream outside.”

Interior of the smoking lounge of a Dornier Do X flying boat, circa 1930. Courtesy NASM.

Cigarettes burned more slowly at high altitudes, and smoking passengers complained that their cigarettes tasted different. There were other considerations as well: “As in-flight smoking became more popular,” says Rust, “the practice of tossing lit cigarettes out of aircraft windows became troublesome. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declared that smoldering cigarettes…dropped from aircraft posed a significant threat to America’s wilderness areas.”

Complimentary cigars were given to passengers by United Air Lines on its popular men-only service, called the New York Executive, says Rust: “A printed list of house rules advised passengers to relax, kick off their shoes, slip off their suit coats and ties, take out their pipes and complimentary cigars, and enjoy the ride in an environment free of female passengers.”

By the 1950s, smoking on airliners began to fall out of favor. One reason was an increase in food service (some passengers felt their extravagant meals were compromised by cigarette smoke). And physicians began warning their patients of the dangers of smoking in flight. In 1969, consumer advocate Ralph Nader filed a petition with the Transportation Department demanding a complete ban on smoking, and bills were quickly introduced in Congress calling for smoking and non-smoking sections aboard U.S. airliners.

In 1971, United Air Lines—one of the first airlines to offer complimentary cigarettes to its passengers in the 1930s—began to segregate cabins into smoking and non-smoking sections.

In 1996, the federal government banned smoking on all flights to and from the United States.

We’ve been loving these new time-lapse views from the International Space Station ever since the ISS crew started posting them last summer.

Now artists like Berlin-based Michael König have started improving and remixing the originals. Man, is this pretty.

Inside mission control. (Photo: Xinhua/Wang Jianmin)

China’s Shenzhou 8 spacecraft and Tiangong-1 mini-space station separated briefly in orbit today, then reunited, in another demonstration of docking techniques for future space stations.

This animation calls it a “kiss in space,” although somehow I can’t imagine that term being used for NASA’s Gemini 8 docking in 1966. Maybe it was because there were astronauts onboard.

Catch-22 began life as "Catch-18," a short, 10-page piece included in the April 1955 issue of New World Writing.

Fifty years ago today, Simon & Schuster published Joseph Heller’s masterpiece, Catch-22. The novel follows the exploits of Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier during World War 2 — just as the author was with the 340th Bombardment Group, 488th Bomb Squadron.

In a new biography titled Just One Catch, Tracy Daugherty writes that during Heller’s training in Victorville, California, he learned that “The bombardier was always the hero or the goat. The success or failure of each mission depended on his timing and accuracy. He also learned that the average life expectancy of a bombardier in heavy combat was three minutes.”

Heller in 1944. Joseph Heller Papers, Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina.

Since bombardiers were occasionally asked to navigate, Heller had to practice that skill as well—something he never mastered. Daugherty writes: “Once, he lost Georgia. Another time, electrical storms interfered with his radio compass. He didn’t know where he was. He pointed to the bank of a river below and told his pilot to turn left—he was sure he’d find a familiar landmark on the river’s opposite bank: a small farm, automobile headlights on a backcountry road. It turned out that the river he’d spotted was really the shore of the Atlantic, and he had pointed his crew toward Africa. Clouds yawed ahead. Finally, the pilot took over, patching together various radio signals to get them back to base with just enough fuel to land.”

Heller would fly 60 missions before shipping home in January 1945.