Crashed B-24 in Papua New Guinea. Photograph by Dietmar Eckell.

German photographer Dietmar Eckell is drawn to abandoned objects: neglected railroad tracks, stranded ships, detritus from past Olympic Games. His latest project, titled Happy End, documents aircraft wreckage—but only from accidents where everyone on board survived.

The photograph above, the last image in the series, shows a B-24 that crashed in Papua New Guinea during World War II. “I wanted a warbird in the jungle with a miracle story,” Eckell wrote in an email, “and always loved the stories of the Pacific wrecks, so I started looking in Papua New Guinea.” According to his information, all nine crew members on board survived the crash.

This Douglas C-47 made a forced landing in Canada in 1950 during a rescue mission for a C-54. Photograph by Dietmar Eckell.

The Douglas C-47 above was the first aircraft Eckell documented during the two-year project. “I’ve been there [Yukon Territory, Canada] twice already, and next time I want to go back in February, as the crash happened in February 1950. The pilot walked all the way to the Alaskan Highway to get help.”

Eckell asks local pilots to help pinpoint exact locations and provide story details, and he searches for information in local archives. “I [was originally] inspired by paintings of shipwrecks in the romantic period,” he writes. “But soon I got hooked on these planes and stories, and it was like a pilgrimage to ‘wonders’ around the world.”

Eckell plans to self-publish Happy End in June; read about his crowdfunding efforts at PetaPixel. Or see more images at Eckell’s Web site.

Entrance to the new Time and Navigation exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum

You’re going to need a clock. That’s what the National Air and Space Museum wants to get across to visitors with its new permanent exhibit, Time and Navigation, opening tomorrow.

“If you want to know where you are, or if you want to know where you’re going, you need a reliable clock,” said Carlene Stephens, a curator at the National Museum of American History, which houses the Smithsonian’s collection of clocks and contributed to the exhibit. Appropriately, visitors enter the exhibit by walking under a beautiful blue and gold clock, in the “spirit of the early and truly magnificent European clocks,” says exhibit designer Heidi Eitel. She wanted to include the automaton clock that comes to life every quarter hour to tell “the story of when people began sharing time.”

The exhibit takes you through three eras, starting with Navigating at Sea, when sailors first used sextants and star charts to find their way across vast oceans. Though ships have had navigators since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that they had marine chronometers that kept reliable time at sea and allowed navigation with any precision. Galileo’s pendulum clock and an interactive 19th-century ship’s sextant that lets visitors navigate by the stars are highlights.

Next, the exhibit takes flight. Even aviation heros like Charles Lindbergh got lost before Navy Lieutenant Commander P.V.H. Weems developed air navigation techniques. Overhead, visitors can see the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae, which Wiley Post and famed navigator Harold Gatty flew around the world in 1931 in just eight days — a feat that could not have been accomplished without precise location-determining skills.

The Lockheed Vega "Winnie Mae," now on display in the Time and Navigation exhibit, was flown around the world in 1931 in just eight days. Photo by Dane Penland, National Air and Space Museum

In the third and final era, navigation gets three-dimensional as it moves into space. Throughout this section of the exhibit are star charts where Earth becomes just another potential destination on the map. Our education on space navigation starts with the story of NASA’s nine Ranger spacecraft, notorious for their failures to reach the moon, including two that completely missed the mark. But astronauts eventually made it to the surface, and visitors can see the Apollo sextant and space shuttle star tracker here. “When we go back into deep space,” said curator Andrew Johnston, “it’ll be very interesting to see how far we’ve come with navigation.” With the technology available today, the exhibit explains, spacecraft missions in 2012 were 100,000 times more accurate than they were in the 1960s.

Finally, the exhibit shows us how we navigate today. Atomic clocks (one is on view in case you need to set your watch) that keep time to three billionths of a second, GPS satellites that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and smartphones that crunch all sorts of data have replaced chronometers and sextants and bulky books of charts. In fact, navigation today doesn’t even need people: Stanford’s driverless-car Stanley is also on display. It won DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge by navigating an off-road 132-mile race. But proving its necessity in our everyday modern lives, Time and Navigation ends with stories from today — a farmer, a fireman and a student explain how their livelihoods are affected by the technology developed since the first sailor located the North Star.

The dirigible Los Angeles "docking" at the Empire State Building. The composite 1930 photograph is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's traveling exhibition, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop."

Ah, the romance of the airship. With its advent, passengers could finally be transported over great distances in comfort—even luxury. “On a plane you fly, but on the Graf Zeppelin you voyage,” remarked one pampered passenger. (For the Graf Zeppelin‘s first transatlantic flight, besotted crowds of 50,000 or more awaited its arrival at the landing field at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1928, even though it was delayed a day due to bad weather. Millions more watched as the airship slowly made its way up the East Coast, floating over Washington, D.C., past Baltimore and above New York City.) The airship experience, however, didn’t come cheap. In 1928, a round trip transatlantic ticket went for $3,000, worth about $40,000 in today’s dollars.

But what about the photograph shown here? The New York Times reports that in 1929, “Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building,” announced that the height of the building would be increased by 200 feet so that a mooring mast for dirigibles could be installed. Smith noted that passengers would exit the airship down a gangplank, and a mere seven minutes later could be on the street, ready to experience everything Manhattan had to offer.

Dr. Hugo Eckener, the commander of the Graf Zeppelin, reports the New York Times, dismissed the project as impractical, noting that dirigible landings required dozens of ground crew, not to mention plenty of rope. “[T]he notion that passengers would be able to descend an airport-style ramp from a moving airship to the tip of the tallest building in the world, even in excellent conditions, beggars belief,” notes the Times.

In 1930, International News Photos distributed this manipulated photograph. At the time, no airship had docked at the Empire State Building. That didn’t happen until September 1931, when a privately-owned dirigible docked for a mere three minutes, in a 40-mile-per-hour wind. “Traffic was tied up in the streets below for more than a half hour as the pilot, Lieutenant William McCraken jockeyed for position in the half gale about the tower 1,200 feet above the ground,” the Times reported in 1931.

This image—and 200 others—are on display at the National Gallery of Art in the exhibition “Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop.” The exhibition runs through May 5, 2013.

On the flight deck of the USS Valley Forge, January 30, 1960. The Skyhook retrieved artifacts and cargo in addition to people. Photograph: NASM.

An MC-130E sporting a Fulton Skyhook retrieval hook. Photograph: ryangreenburg.com.

A pickup aircraft (note the “horns” on the nose) would then fly directly at the line, aiming at a marker placed at an altitude of 425 feet. As the line was caught on the forks, the balloon would release, and a spring-loaded mechanism would secure the line to the aircraft. The person was then winched up the line.

The first live test of Robert Fulton’s system was done with a pig, notes the CIA’s page on Fulton and Operation Coldfeet. “Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 mph. It arrived on board undamaged but in a disoriented state. Once it recovered, it attacked the crew.” (We aren’t surprised, are we?)

The Fulton "Skyhook" suit, post-conservation. Photograph: NASM.

The National Air and Space Museum is in the process of conserving its Fulton Skyhook suit, which was donated to the Museum in 1972 by the U.S. Air Force. “Skyhook was meant to be universal,” says Steven Pickman, a conservator in the Museum’s Conservation Laboratory. “It fit any size adult, and was suitable for any environment.” When they first inspected the suit, the conservation team was alarmed by a white material on its surface. The haze wasn’t mold or salt efflorescence, and, in fact, wasn’t harmful at all, so the team just added storage supports and left the suit alone.

Fulton manual, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. "After the pickup is made, the pilot allows approximately 15 seconds for the load to stabilize, then pulls the nose of the airplane up." Illustration: slugsite.com.

The Fulton manual notes that “The effect of the induced acceleration forces on the human body due to the aerial pickup by this system has been carefully evaluated. The recorded accelerations, from numerous tests, have ranged from 4.5 Gs to 10.2 Gs with a mean value of 5.5 Gs.” While the system was capable—in theory—of rescuing three 200-pound men at one time, the manual points out that “Since the feasibility of multiple pickups has only been proven with animals at this time, it is judged that multiple pickups of human beings will not normally be used until thoroughly tested.”

Researchers at the University of Queensland note that male crocodiles "have remarkable navigational skills." Photo courtesy Sheba_Also/Flickr.

Two months ago, on a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne, Australia, a crocodile got loose in the cargo hold of a Qantas aircraft. “The animal was quickly and safely secured when the aircraft arrived in Melbourne,” a Qantas spokesman told The Australian.

It’s not the first time a croc flew. Two years before that, a crocodile—carried on board in a large duffel bag—allegedly escaped on a Filair flight from Kinshasa to Bandundu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Pandemonium ensued,” reported msnbc.com. The Let L-410 Turbolet crashed, killing 20 on board. (The croc escaped, but was killed by ground crew.)

The earliest reference we can find of crocodilians becoming airborne dates to 1929. Yoav Di-Capua writes (in the summer 2008 issue of the Journal of Social History), “[I]n 1929, at the age of thirty, a bored employee at Bank Misr named Muhammad Sidqi decided to replace his wooden office chair with a posh leather seat in an airplane cockpit. Resigning his position, he enrolled in a German aviation school. A few months later…he purchased a modest monoplane with a 45-hp. engine and an overall weight of less than 250kg. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Egyptian authorities, on December 15th he left from Berlin, and, via Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Venice and Malta, made his way to Libya. With him in the cockpit was a small crocodile that was presented to him in Berlin as a gift for the Cairo Zoological Gardens.”

On January 26, 1930, thousands of people — including the Egyptian Prime Minister — gathered to watch Sidqi land on a Cairo airstrip. The mob swarmed the rickety aircraft as it landed, and triumphantly carried the newly minted pilot through the Cairo streets. The next day the newspapers covered Sidqi’s feat, but “Not a word was written on the fate of the small crocodile that had bravely accompanied Sidqi on his perilous journey back home,” notes Di-Capua.

The largest recorded crocodile was almost 23 feet long, a bit taller than your average pilot. Photo courtesy Neerav Bhatt (www.neeravbhatt.com).

An airway marking on an unidentified 12-story building, presumably in the Atlanta area, circa early 1930s. Photograph courtesy NASM.

For a pilot delivering airmail in the early 1920s, navigation “technology” consisted of leaning out of the cockpit and using the landscape to find the way. “Follow the tracks of the Long Island Railroad past Belmont Park race track,” read the 1921 U.S. Air Mail Service Pilots’ Directions from Long Island to Cleveland. “Cross New York over the lower end of Central Park.” Even after radio navigation aids were introduced in the late 1920s, pilots still used landmarks to complete their trips.

Nighttime aerial view of lighted neon airway marking installed by the Neale Rainbow Light Corporation, Ltd., on the roof of the Bendix Aviation Corporation Building, Los Angeles, CA, circa 1932. Photograph courtesy NASM.

The arrow with the figure “9″ (above), according to National Air and Space Museum records, indicates the mileage and direction to the nearest airport, in this case, Grand Central. The official Department of Commerce sprocket-shaped marker (with a center star) signified that approved accommodations and services could be had at the airport indicated by the arrow.

Unidentified factory building near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, circa 1931. Photograph courtesy NASM.

In the photograph above, taken in Massachusetts, the “C” in the circle with arrow and numeral “3″ gives the direction and distance to the nearest airfield.

“By 1941, some 13,000 marks had been painted on barns, hangars, skyscrapers, oil tanks, and train stations,” Roger Mola wrote for us in “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” “Though federal aviation agencies regulated every aspect of letter size (10 to 30 feet tall) to paint (Chrome Yellow Number 4 on a black background) to distance between markers (one every 15 miles was the goal), they never lifted a brush,” writes Mola. “Labor came from the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Air Patrol, the Civilian Conservation Corps, civic volunteers, scouting organizations, and the Ninety-Nines organization of women pilots.”

The "Big C" at the University of California at Berkeley. Photograph courtesy Clare Hatfield/Flickr.

Landscape markers were so common that their histories were sometimes conflated with other scenic features, such as giant hillside letters. As Guy Rocha, former Nevada State Archivist, wrote in 2004, “The folklore is that the hillside letters found principally throughout the American west were created to help early 20th-century airplane pilots navigate and identify communities, presumably when the aviators could see the letters during daylight hours, with good weather, and no snow cover. The truth is the hillside letters are first and foremost symbols of school and community pride dating back to 1905. Early-day pilots found the hillside letters useful at times; however, any aeronautical value associated with the school and community letters came after the fact.”

Berkeley’s 70-foot-high “Big C,” notes James J. Parsons in Landscape, “[W]as built by the freshman and sophomore classes over two rainy days in the spring of 1905 and finished in time for official recognition at the annual Charter Day celebration. The traditional brawl between the two classes had degenerated into something close to guerrilla warfare, a kind of primal savagery known as ‘the rush’ that was likened by one contemporary to Anglo-Saxon raids on the British coast…. In a well-publicized truce, the classes…agreed to devote their energies to constructing a masonry C on the steep, grassy slope behind the campus.”

The job we all dream of: Crashing a Boeing 727 in the name of science. Photograph courtesy the Discovery Channel.

The odds of you being killed in an airplane crash, dear reader, are a million to one. But that didn’t stop the Discovery Channel from loading a 727 with a dazzling array of sensors and crashing it into the Mexican desert, all in the name of science. The results of the experiment will be aired this Sunday, October 7, as the season premiere of “Curiosity.”

Among other things, the filmmakers wanted to determine if there was anything a passenger could do to improve his or her odds of surviving. Where should you sit? Does bracing help, or is that an old wives’ tale? Crash-test dummies (which cost $150,000 each and provide 32 different types of data) were placed throughout the aircraft. Some were set in the brace position, while others were seated upright. “Low-tech dummies” were also used, either buckled into their seats, or seated without restraints.

A masterpiece of understatement: "It was not exactly the impact that was hoped for," reads NASA's caption of its Boeing 720 fireball. Photograph courtesy NASA.

An experiment on this scale, notes the film, has been tried only once before. In 1984, NASA spent millions crashing a Boeing 720 into Rogers Dry Lake in the California desert. But the aircraft lost control on the final approach and burst into flames after crashing—not good for collecting data. (The experiment was part of a joint research project between NASA and the FAA to test the effectiveness of a fire-suppressing fuel additive.)

Watch a clip from the show, below:

On August 17, 1946, Sergeant Lawrence Lambert volunteered to be hurtled from his P-61 at the speed of 302 miles per hour.

They don’t make volunteers like they used to. On August 17, 1946, First Sergeant Lawrence Lambert became the first person in the United States to be shot out of a speeding aircraft.

His shot (as in “out of a cannon”; at least that’s what it must have felt like) was the first U.S. manned test of an ejection seat. U.S. Air Force source documents note that Lambert’s P-61 was traveling more than 300 miles per hour, at an altitude of 6,000 feet. “Lambert was thrown approximately 40 feet in the air at a speed of nearly 40 miles an hour for that distance,” notes the report. “The ejector seat shoots a pilot straight up at a speed of approximately 60 feet per second. Though this is only about 40 miles per hour, the speed must be reach[ed] almost instantly, and this entails a rapid acceleration and thus a terrific strain. The acceleration increases a man’s weight momentarily. A 200-pound man might weigh nearly two tons at the acceleration used by the ejector.” Lambert experienced between 12 to 14 Gs as he ejected; he cleared the P-61′s tail fin by a mere 20 feet.

For this test, Lambert received the Distinguished Flying Cross. The recommendation for the citation, put forward by Colonel C.K. Moore, reads in part, “Sergeant Lambert’s courageous acceptance of this responsibility and successful demonstration of the highly experimental equipment has helped to solve one of the most acute problems faced by the Army Air Forces—the escape of personnel from the high speed aircraft in present operation and aircraft of higher speeds to come. His achievement has immeasurably advanced aerodynamic and medical knowledge and will make possible improved methods of escape heretofore unknown.”

Watch another ejection from a P-61, here:

Sullenberger with his daughters in 2001 -- pre-fame. (Photo courtesy Chesley Sullenberger)

Scuttlebutt inside the FAA has it that Chesley Sullenberger, or “Sully,” the pilot who executed a spectacularly successful ditching of a USAirways Airbus A320 in New York’s Hudson River, is the object of a petition drive to have him replace Randy Babbitt, who resigned as FAA administrator following a drunk driving arrest.

Now Sullenberger may be a hero and a durn’ good pilot, and yes, FAA administrators who were pilots have had some modest advantages over non-pilots in speaking the language and knowing the aviation community. But Sullenberger has also come across in his many public appearances as a nice, modest guy. He has stepped up to the plate when various causes have asked him to be their spokesperson. And he’s written a couple of books, one of which is awaiting release.

Well, Mr. Smith may have survived Washington when he served a term there, but the town can sometimes be pretty hard on FAA chiefs. Before the FAA administrator’s term was defined as five years in length, to extend it beyond the election cycle, each new presidential administration had to find an acceptable candidate for approval by Congress. It was a political football, and both parties knew it. Jack Shaffer, Nixon’s man, was pilloried by the air traffic controllers’ attorney, F. Lee Bailey, and when Shaffer left, Alexander Butterfield (a pilot, by the way) moved from the White House Staff office to FAA headquarters as administrator — where he promptly became entangled in the Nixon Watergate scandal. J. Lynn Helms set about modernizing the FAA, and must have irked somebody with some power, because the Wall Street Journal ran a series of unrelenting attacks on his education record, which caused him to resign.

It’s gotten better since the advent of five-year terms, and the first administrator under the new rule, Jane Garvey, as well as her successor, Marion Blakey, seemed to thrive at the job. Both were professional managers and highly attuned to the politics of the capital. For now, Michael Huerta is acting administrator, and he has a reputation as a manager. Maybe Sullenberger’s petitioners just want a pilot back at the top, but do they really want to do that to a nice guy?

They fly more than a million hours a year, yet the more than 2,000 “public aircraft” operated by government agencies — from local police departments to the National Science Foundation — are  not subject to FAA regulation.  As with any aircraft, they have occasional accidents, like the police helicopter that went down in New Mexico in June 2009 (pictured), killing the pilot and one passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board has investigated 300 such accidents over the last 10 years.

The Board will take up the subject of public aircraft safety at a forum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday and Thursday, which will be webcast for those who can’t attend in person.

Board member Mark Rosekind gives an overview of the subject here: