Monthly Archives: January 2013

Plans for the Little Known Confederate Helicopter

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As my colleague Dr. Tom Crouch referenced in a previous post, our nation is currently in the midst of commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War (or sesquicentennial for you Latin fans).  While other branches of the Smithsonian, such as the National Museum of American History and National Portrait gallery, have a wide depth of artifacts and images with which they can share stories from the time period, the National Air and Space Museum has far fewer relevant items in its collection.  We do, however, have some of the most surprising Civil War artifacts in the entire Institution.  Not only does the Museum preserve Thaddeus Lowe’s “double telescope,” but the Museum’s Archives Department preserves a set of drawings containing plans for the most marvelous of contraptions – the Confederate helicopter.

The American Civil War brought about great advances in the use of technology in warfare.  Balloons, railroads, ironclad ships, and even a submarine were demonstrated throughout the conflict, and new ideas were constantly being thought up and tried on the battlefield.  Some ideas were more exotic than others, such as the one thought of by William C. Powers.  In 1862, most of the ports of the Southern states were completely blockaded by Union naval forces, choking off much needed supplies and commerce.  William C. Powers was an architectural engineer living in Mobile, Alabama, and personally saw the effects of the Northern blockade.  Powers knew that the southern states did not have enough ships to break the blockade with naval power, and going through the blockade was full of risks.  William Powers saw another way to crush the blockade – attack it from the air. 

Using his engineering skills, Powers began drafting plans for a machine that could lift off and propel itself through the air to attack Union ships.  Although balloons were being effectively used for observation, they lacked directional control and could not lift enough weight to make an effective bomber.  Powers drew upon the work of other famous engineers, such as Archimedes and da Vinci, and employed Archimedean screws for lift and thrust, all powered by a steam engine.  The engine was located in the middle of the craft, and used two smokestacks, which can be seen in the drawings.  Two Archimedean screws on the sides gave the helicopter forward thrust, similar to how a propeller works on a ship in water, and two mounted vertically in the helicopter gave it lift.  A rudder was added to the rear of the craft in order to provide steering.  The drawings below show these Archimedean screws represented by the snaking line that runs across the page.

 

Archimedean screws

Side View drawing showing the longitudinal and vertical Archimedean screws and central location of smoke stacks. Source: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM-A-34450-E).

 

experimental aircraft drawing

Drawing of the side view of the car and vertical shafting showing details of the steam engine including the boiler, cylinder, and crankshaft. Source: National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM-A-34450-C).

 

After drafting his plans, Powers set out to make a small model and then a full-size mockup.  Although he had some success creating the small model, as can be seen below, limited resources and lack of support prevented the idea from ever leaving the drawing board.  Family lore also says that fear prevented the idea from getting off the ground.  When the drawings were donated to the Museum, family members stated that they were hidden during the war to prevent them from falling into Union hands.  It was said that a full size example was never created for fear that it would be captured by the Union, mass produced, and used to rain destruction on the Confederate armies and cities throughout the South. 

 

Civil War Helicopter

Three quarter view of the experimental model built by William C. Powers. Source: National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM-A-34342-A).

 

Although the laws of aerodynamics were not on the side of William C. Powers or his helicopter, they do reveal an interesting aspect of the technological advances which came about as a result of the Civil War.  Powers even stumbles upon a building method which would be resurrected later on to manufacture airships and even bombers.In the drawing shown below, it is clear that the “hull” of the Powers aircraft would have been constructed using a lattice approach, similar to that used in the British Vickers Wellington Bomber.  This provides incredible strength without adding lots of weight.Perhaps Mr. Powers was just ahead of his time….

British Vickers Wellington Bomber

Drawing of the sectional view showing the mesh lattice construction, similar to the British Vickers Wellington Bomber. Source: National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM-A-34449-D).

Tom Paone is a museum specialist in the Aeronautics Department of the National Air and Space Museum.

Reflections on “Explore the Universe” 2001-2012

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One of the jokes I inherited from my student years is the final exam question “Describe the Universe” which was followed by “and give two examples.” In the 1960s, this could be funny of course, at least to astronomers. Today, however, the answer might be, “Only two?”  Since the Explore the Universe gallery opened in September 2001, the appreciation that more than our universe may well exist has strengthened  If we were to revamp the gallery today, there would be some discussion of where the evidence might someday actually come from.  What we will probably do instead is utilize one of the various updatable features already in the gallery, when the time really comes.

Indeed, as the Museum contemplated a new astronomy gallery in the 1990s, we knew that we were dealing with a subject that is constantly changing.  We had formed a core group of scientists, historians, educators, and designers to craft a vision for the new presentation.  What emerged, after three Museum directors and many other staff changes, was a simple and hardly radical statement: “New Tools, New Universes.”  Of course, it was the same universe each time, but seen and understood more completely, and, typically, was found to be very unlike the conception that went before.  This single statement embodied others, like “New Universes tend to be larger and less homocentric” or “There are no final answers, only better informed questions.”

One of the most interesting themes, or threads, that we decided to incorporate, however, was how “Women have played significant roles in changing our view of the nature of the Universe.”  This last one, like the others, helped to guide the choices we made as to what instruments played a role in giving us new views, where did those instruments come from, and who were the people who either used those instruments or analyzed the data coming from them?

During the course of developing the gallery we well knew that astronomy has long been a male-dominated enterprise.  This is, happily, no longer the case. But even in past times, it is not difficult to point to women who played critical roles in revolutionizing our view of the nature of the Universe.

We therefore set about to portray some of these women in Explore the Universe, within the contexts in which they worked, and the roles they played making the new discoveries.  As you walk through the gallery located on the east end of the first floor of the Museum, here are some of the stories  you will encounter:

The First Room

The first universe you will encounter is human or earth-centered, “homocentric” in other words.  It was the view we constructed based upon observations by eye alone, aided only by pointing devices to determine positions of things in the sky, and over time, their motions.  The geometric earth centered view of the Greeks is depicted, together with the instruments that refined it, ending in a replica of Tycho Brahe’s great 16th Century equatorial armillary sphere being used by one of his assistants.  No women are depicted here.

Armillary Sphere

A view of the Tycho Armillary Sphere reproduction on display in “Explore the Universe.” The Sphere was built by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the late 1500s to study the sky and to teach about the celestial coordinate system.

The Second Room

The second universe, brought by the advent of the telescope, led to the confirmation of a model suggested prior to Tycho: that the universe was centered on the Sun and not the earth.  Tycho’s tables and observations had given strong evidence of this, but in and of themselves were not sufficient to overthrow the Aristotelian universe.  Observations with Galileo’s telescope were sensational enough to bring about this revolution, enabled by his ability to dramatically portray his evidence (the Jovian satellites, the Venusian phases, the Sun’s spots, etc.) through visual representation.

Walking through this second room is a walk through telescopic history in a universe composed of stars, all contained within what we call the Milky Way.  Ever bigger and more powerful telescopes were built through the 18th and 19th centuries to probe this universe. Featured in the gallery is the grand 20-foot reflector of William Herschel in a diorama showing him at work gauging the heavens, with his sister Caroline both directing and recording his observing routine from an open window.  Caroline’s contribution to William’s legacy, producing the first observational map of the structure of the known universe, was in fact as more than his assistant.  It was she, according to recent scholarship, who made William’s work systematic, and it was she who also encouraged him to carefully catalog those fuzzy faint apparitions they were recording night after night, year by year.  These so-called nebular forms could be unresolved clusters of stars, or some ethereal shining fluid out of which stars someday would form.  But were they among the stars? Or beyond the stars?  Were they other universes, the Herschels asked?  The distribution of the nebulae was oddly different than the distribution of stars, or the shape of the universe as they found it.

Carolyn Herschel

Carolyn Herschel was an astronomer and researcher who became the first woman, and the only woman for well over a century, to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London. Her work was formally recognized in 1828.

Caroline, of course, worked in astronomy by virtue of her brother’s interests, and they both were supported by a king’s pension, provided by George III  after William had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

The Third Room

The question the Herschels posed (“what was the nature of the nebulae?”) was answered in the early 20th century when photography was applied to increase the power of the telescope.  The eye is a very sensitive detector of light energy, but it accumulates that energy for only a very small fraction of a second, depending upon the light level.  Photographic emulsions can collect and accumulate light energy for many hours, providing a vast increase in sensitivity.  This is why, once photographic emulsions came available, they were quickly adapted to telescope cameras to replace the eye.  Now, also, information could be stored on these photographic plates and be available permanently, housed in protected chambers astronomers called vaults, and brought out for examination day and night.

By 1900, photographic astronomy had shown that most of the faint nebulae Herschel had glimpsed were in fact spiral in structure, reminiscent of whirlpools.  And there were many many thousands of them.  Meanwhile, women working at Harvard College Observatory, like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, were making some very valuable observations and coming to powerful conclusions examining many photographs over time of  nearby star clusters like the Clouds of Magellan, visible only from the southern hemisphere.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Swan Leavitt examined photographs of both the Small and the Large Magellanic Clouds taken over many weeks and months and found over 2,500 stars that varied in brightness in the two clouds, now known as companion galaxies to the Milky Way. She was the first to show that the variations in brightness were a measure of the intrinsic brightnesses of these stars, thus providing a powerful new distance indicator for astronomy.

There were many stars in these clusters that did not radiate constantly, but varied in brightness over great ranges.  Leavitt’s contribution, between 1908 and 1912, was to realize that for a certain class of these light-varying (or variable) stars, the period of their variation was in proportion to their mean brightnesses.  The brighter ones had longer periods (a matter of days) than the fainter ones.  Since all the stars were in the same cluster, and therefore at the same distance, she had discovered an intrinsic property of these stars.  Without even knowing why these stars varied in brightness, she showed that they constituted a new and valuable means for determining the distances to stars, if their intrinsic brightnesses could be ascertained.  Her conclusion was quickly picked up by a astronomers both in Europe and the United States.  The Mount Wilson astronomer Harlow Shapley calibrated this class of variables and found bunches of them in globular clusters. By 1920, he had determined their distribution and from it deduced the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, finding it so vast he felt nothing could be outside of it.

Soon after Shapley’s work, Edwin Hubble, also working at Mount Wilson with the new 100-inch reflecting telescope, used Leavitt’s variables and Shapley’s calibrations, modified by others, to determine the distance to the Andromeda nebulae, one of the largest and brightest spirals in the sky. He found that its distance was at least 10 times greater than Shapley’s estimate for the size of the Milky Way. In others words, it lay outside the Milky Way and hence was an island universe.  Thus Leavitt, employed as an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory (not included through an accident of family as Caroline Herschel had been) produced a distance-determining tool that once again revolutionized the universe.  We live in a universe of galaxies, not stars.

Magellanic Clouds

Magellanic Clouds. Credit: AURA/NOAO/NSF.

Neither Leavitt or Caroline Herschel worked as independent astronomers, setting their own course of investigation. Although Leavitt was given a certain degree of freedom to search out anything that might be interesting, she was directed to this work by others.  As you continue to walk through the gallery, you will encounter other women, in more recent times, who designed their own research programs and carried them out. These include Vera Rubin in the fifth room, who found in the 1970s that dark matter dominates galaxies like Andromeda, and Margaret Geller, who found in the 1980s that the universe is not uniform, but clumpy on a huge scale that may well outline the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

So if and when we find evidence that, indeed, universes other than our own exist, and have left their marks on our own universe in deep time, what role will women play in that realization?  Only time, and larger telescopes on the ground and in space, will tell.

David DeVorkin is a curator in the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum.

The Archives Department’s First Anniversary at the Udvar-Hazy Center

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On January 10, 2012, the National Air and Space Museum Archives Department officially opened its new reading room at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center to public researchers.  We welcomed six researchers that day, including two who had scheduled a trip from Germany to coincide with our grand opening.

The opening was the culmination of a massive move that took place during the fall of 2011, when the Archives Department consolidated the majority of its collections from the Museum in Washington, DC, and the Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland, Maryland.  In only a month, the Archives Department transferred almost 17,000 containers, 18,000 reels of microfilm, 13,000 rolls of motion picture film, and 7,000 videos.

Archives Reading Room

Archives Open House at Become a Pilot Day 2012. (NASM 2013-00046)

In the past year, more than 270 researchers have visited the new reading room to make use of our collections.  They’ve pursued all manners of research, including our Captured German and Japanese Air Technical Documents Collection, our in-house photo database,and the numerous personal papers and corporate records collections that we hold.

Sometimes researchers find items in our collections that we don’t even know we have.  This fall, one of our researchers came across a fun photograph of Orville Wright.  According to the documentation that accompanied the photograph, Orville often went out to fly in business clothes and shoes, whereas the mechanics wore hip boots. This test flight of a flying boat had landed in Ohio’s Miami River, so a mechanic carried Orville piggyback-style and put him in the plane so he wouldn’t get his feet wet.

Orville Wright

Mechanic Bill Conover gives Orville Wright a piggyback ride to their aircraft waiting in the Miami River, 1913. (NASM 9A10110)

In June, at least 80 visitors attended our Open House at Become a Pilot Day.  This was a great opportunity to check out some of our more colorful collections, including the Ruth Law Scrapbook and selected documents and photographs from the Dino Brugioni Collection.

Ruth Law was the first woman to loop the loop, the first person to fly a plane at night, and a one-time holder of the Chicago to New York aerial speed record.  Law volunteered to fly for the United States during World War I, but was turned down.  She did, however, fly recruiting tours for the military during the war, earning the right to wear the uniform of a noncommissioned Army officer.

Ruth Law

Ruth Law “bombshell” Liberty Bond advertising leaflet designed to be dropped from her airplane in flight. (NASM 9A01634)

Dino Brugioni is the former Chief of Information at the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC).  During his 35 year career, Brugioni helped establish imagery intelligence as a national asset to solve intelligence problems. His aerial reconnaissance work played a major role in providing intelligence throughout the Cold War.  A portion of his collection deals with his work identifying and analyzing missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Guanajay IRBM

Aerial image of Guanajay IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) Launch Site 1 with Probable Nuclear Warhead Storage Site, Cuba, 17 October 1962. (NASM 9A09015)

And that’s just a year of activity in the public reading room.  Behind the scenes, archivists are hard at work acquiring and processing new collections, filling order requests, and answering reference questions from all over the world.

If you’re in the DC metro area and have a research interest in air and space history, consider making an appointment to visit the Archives.  Although we hold large film and microfilm collections, the majority of our records are paper. So in our case, isn’t it fitting that the traditional representation of a first anniversary is paper?

Elizabeth C. Borja is a reference services archivist in the National Air and Space Museum’s Archives Department.

Minor Planet 4262 DeVorkin

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David DeVorkin

David DeVorkin is a curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space Museum.

On  6 April 2012, the following notice appeared in the Minor Planet Circular, under the category “Names of New Minor Planets”:

(4262) DeVorkin = 1989 CO
Discovered 1989 Feb. 5 by M. Arai and H. Mori at Yorii.
David H. DeVorkin (b. 1944) Chair of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (1997-1999), wrote the definitive biography of astronomer Henry Norris Russell. DeVorkin has been Curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum since 1981.

How did a “minor planet”—colloquially and better known as an asteroid—come to be named after our own David DeVorkin? The story goes back to the retirement party at NASA Headquarters of Steven J. Dick, then Chief Historian of NASA, and before that, the historian of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., for many years. At the party the honoree was delighted by the announcement of a new asteroid name, 6544 Stevendick. I was happy for him, and thought that it would be great if we could the same thing some day for David, who had made so many contributions to the Museum and to the history of astronomy. The idea sat in the back of my mind for a couple of years, as I really wasn’t sure how to go about it. I decided to postpone it until Steve arrived as the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History in mid-2011 (a one-year fellowship for senior scholars with distinguished publication records).

After he arrived, Steve and I talked about whether we could time a naming for some event, such as a birthday, but the timing could not be reliably controlled. That indeed turned out to be the case, as the first time we submitted a nomination, someone lost Steve’s e-mail and we had to do it all over again in early 2012. The naming process is to submit a short nomination paragraph  (often a capsule biography) to the International Astronomical Union’s Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature via the Minor Planet Center, a body of the IAU run by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

We fashioned the biography above to fit the strict criteria for brevity and included details that might appeal to the astronomers on the committee. Then we waited for something to happen, such as an e-mail. Of course we couldn’t take it for granted that the nomination would be accepted, although it appeared likely. Steve was also concerned that the news would leak after the name came out, based on David’s close contacts with the astronomical community. But nothing happened. Last April Steve finally suggested that we check the Minor Planet Circular, which is the official publication of record and comes out each month around full Moon, and there it was. At least we managed to surprise David.

Comets are named after their first discoverers, a convention that arose in the early twentieth century, but that rule applies to almost nothing else in the sky. When astronomers found the first four asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they treated them as planets, naming them for Roman gods to continue the tradition. As Caltech astronomer Mike Brown notes in his eminently readable memoir How I Killed Pluto, And Why It Had It Coming  (2010), for some time there were 11 or 12 planets, including  those four and in 1846, the newly discovered Neptune. But the proliferation of asteroid discoveries in the late nineteenth century, combined with their small size, resulted in their demotion to minor planethood—sending the number of major planets back to eight, then nine when Clyde Tombaugh discovered  Pluto in 1930, and back to eight when the IAU demoted it to “dwarf planet” in 2006. (Brown discovered the erstwhile tenth planet, Eris, in 2005, but actually favored the reduction to eight, based on the fact that Pluto turned out to only one of a number of rather small “Kuiper Belt objects.”)

As the number of asteroid names grew, a Greco-Roman naming convention became less and less feasible and was eventually dropped for Main Belt objects between Mars and Jupiter—570,355 on the day I write this, and growing by the day, although many have not been assigned formal numbers yet. As the rules in the above link reveal, there are several special classes of minor planets that do retain classical or mythological naming conventions, many of them in special orbits like the Earth-crossers we are increasingly worried about. But Main Belt asteroids can be named almost anything credible by their discoverers for ten years after the object receives an official number—but as the rules say, not for one’s dog, or for political figure who hasn’t been dead for a century. After the decade is up, unnamed asteroids are left to the discretion of the IAU Committee. Rightly or wrongly, Steve and I take the assignment of the relatively low number of 4262 to David DeVorkin as a sign of the appreciation of the committee for the importance of his work (only one with a lower number was named in the 6 April Circular).

What do we know about 4262 DeVorkin? Not very much. Discovered by two Japanese astronomers, it is a small rock, only a few kilometers across, orbiting in the Main Belt. The only pictures of it that have been taken show just a moving pinpoint of light. But perhaps in this or some future century, one of our spacecraft, crewed or robotic, might pass by and take some pictures. Someone will ask: who was DeVorkin anyway? The official description on some future version of the web will be one way he or she could find out.

Michael J. Neufeld is a curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of  Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007).

That was the Year That Was…2012 in Air and Space

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No question 2012 will be remembered as a simultaneously joyous and tumultuous year, certainly in politics but also in air and space. As a retrospective of the year just gone, here are my five most significant events in air and space. Like all such lists, it is idiosyncratic and I recognize that others might choose different events. I list them in order of their occurrence—not according to their significance—during the year, along with my reason for including them on this list. Comments are most welcome from others concerning other events that might find their way into this discussion of 2012 in air and space.

  1. A century of U.S. Marine Corps aviation (May 22, 1912). One hundred years ago, on May 22, 1912, the first Marine Corps aviator, First Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham, began the effort to create a flying corps for the Marines. He took flight at the Burgess and Curtiss aircraft factory at Marblehead, Massachusetts, in August 1912. During the year that followed Cunningham made 400 sorties in the Curtiss Model B-1, instructing others, and working through tactics of air operations. From that modest beginning the Marine Corps built a formidable flying force that has engaged in combat as needed throughout the world.

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham in a Curtiss hydroaeroplane in 1914. Cunningham was Naval Aviator No. 5 and as the first Marine aviator, is considered the father of Marine Aviation.

  2. Landing of Curiosity rover on Mars (August 6, 2012). There was nothing magic about it, but the event itself transcended the hard-edged scientific and technological knowledge that made the latest Mars landing successful. After years of hard work and dedication, the team working on Mars Curiosity had their moment of truth about 1:30 a.m. EDT on August 6. The first data back demonstrated that the rover has reached the surface of the red planet safely, and the first images to reach Earth showed where Curiosity was sitting on the Gale Crater floor. It was euphoric,…at mission control, around NASA, in numerous science centers, and in Times Square where thousands gathered to watch the proceedings. It was a geek’s dream come true as the folks in Times Square watching on the big screen began chanting “sci-ence, sci-ence, sci-ence.” Of course, at year’s end there was still more to do—a lot more—as Mars Curiosity undertakes its multi-year mission to explore the Gale Crater and to climb Mt. Sharp in its center. Curiosity brings to the red planet’s surface a formidable life sciences laboratory that may well help us resolve beyond serious question whether or not life ever existed on Mars. This rover is the first full-scale astrobiology mission to Mars since the Viking landers of 1976. The mission is intended to help NASA answer this massively large question: Are there locations on or under the surface that could have supported—or might still support—life on Mars?

    Curiosity

    Curiosity on Mars (artist’s conception). Credit: NASA/JPL. Image number: PIA14156.

  3. Passing of Neil Armstrong (August 25, 2012). The aerospace world lost an iconic figure this past year with the passing of the first human to set foot on the Moon from complications resulting from heart bypass surgery. He was 82 years old. We will all miss him, not just because he was the first human being in the history of the world to set foot on another body in the solar system, but perhaps especially because of the honor and dignity with which he lived his life as that first Moon walker. He sought neither fame nor riches, and he was always more comfortable with a small group of friends rather than the limelight before millions. When he might have done anything he wished after his completion of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Armstrong chose to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. My favorite memories of Neil Armstrong were at the various anniversaries of the Moon landing. He was always a bit perplexed by all of the praise heaped on him. It was the result of the labor of hundreds of thousands and the accomplishment of a generation of humanity, Armstrong always said. More than this, he was a superb research pilot, a geeky aerospace engineer, and a gentleman of true honor and dignity.

    Neil Armstrong

    Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong inside the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission. NASA photo.

  4. Space Dive by Felix Baumgartner (October 14, 2012). Dropping from a balloon at over 128,000 ft (39,000 m), Baumgartner broke the 1960 record of Joseph Kittinger for a high-altitude jump. Reaching a speed of Mach 1.24, Baumgartner safely returned to Earth at Roswell, New Mexico, after a 4-minute, 22-second free fall before opening his parachute at about 5,000 feet (1,524 meters). The Austrian sky diver had difficulty controlling his body at that high speed and went into a flat spin which he worked to recover from before passing out.
  5. Safest Year for flying in history (December 31, 2012). It is now officially safer to fly than ever before, according to the Aviation Safety Network which released its 2012 airliner accident statistics showing a total of 475 airliner accident fatalities, resulting from 23 fatal airliner accidents. Both figures were much lower than the ten-year average of 34 accidents and 773 fatalities. Compared to 2011, the number of fatal crashes and accidents fell dramatically over the last twelve months, to just one death for every 2.5 million flights. Almost 75 percent of the 2012 fatalities came because of two major incidents—153 lives were lost in Nigeria when a DANA Air jet crash landed in June and 127 deaths occurred when a Bhoja Air airliner crashed in Pakistan last April.

Roger D. Launius is a senior curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.