All Entries
24 entries
Media · Popular Culture
Clarence gets his wings. Santa's reindeer. Turbo-Man's jetpack. The Die Hard helicopter. Holiday movies as an accidental archive of aerom...
Media · Television · 1963
William Shatner, a window seat, and the largest gremlin on record. The Twilight Zone episode that kept the mythology alive through the Co...
Media · Literature · WWII
5,000 copies. Viking hats. A forest destroyed by a plane factory. The RAF pilot's children's book that almost became a Disney film.
Aviation · Identity · Language
The small myth: a persona assigned by community, not chosen. Maverick, Goose, Iceman as aeromythic archetypes in flight suits.
Aviation · Design · Language
McDonnell's demons, Lockheed's stars, Douglas's sky. The name as act of mythologizing — and the ICAO phonetic alphabet.
Media · Design · WWII
First 'appeared' October 1941. And Yehudi Lights — the real counter-illumination system that actually tried to make aircraft invisible.
Media · WWII Era
Action Comics #1, June 1938. The dawn of superheroes coincides with WWII. Superman is what flight feels like to someone who cannot have it.
Media · Design
Dave Stevens' 1982 comic and the 1991 film. The jetpack as democratic wing — flight without vehicle, nothing between the body and the sky...
Theory · Media
Roland Barthes' 1957 essay on the jet pilot as a new mythological figure — emptied of heroism by speed.
Media · Contemporary
Named for real Astronaut Buzz Aldrin. A meditation on the mythology of spaceflight, the cowboy's obsolescence, and the impossible power o...
Folklore · WWII · Aviation
RAF mechanical scapegoats turned Roald Dahl characters turned Spielberg film. The machine's shadow-self given a name and a grudge.
Aviation History · Industrial
July 2, 1937 — disappearance. The myth of the missing aviator.
Aviation History · Design
Inventor of the ripcord, first woman to jump from an airplane. Traced through Pat the Parachute (1942) to Batman to GI Joe.
Aviation History · Industrial
Ping pong on biplanes, chess at altitude, bicycle riding on wings. Outlawed below 1,500 feet in 1936 — which effectively ended the era.
Aviation History · 1903
The Breakthrough Node. December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk. Also: contested claims from Pittsburgh and Georgia, and George Cayley's foundationa...
Aviation History · 1783
The first successful human-carrying flight technology. Also: the fake Russian first, sky lanterns from 200 BC, and the Hindenburg.
Media · Mythology
From Swift's satirical floating island to Miyazaki's elegy, to Cloud City and NASA space settlements. A catalog of the inhabited sky.
Mythology · Medieval
A 9th-century cloud realm whose aerial sailors descended during storms to steal grain. Agobard of Lyon refuted it — and in doing so, docu...
Folklore · Diaspora
Gullah/Geechee legend of enslaved people who escaped bondage by flying back to Africa. Flight as ultimate liberation and sovereignty.
Mythology · WWII
WWII pilot tactics rooted in the legend of the Divine Winds that saved Japan from the Mongols in the 13th century. Myth lived in real time.
Mythology · Medieval
Norse female warriors who chose the fallen and escorted them to Valhalla. Persistent in WWI nose art, Wagner's Ring, and Apocalypse Now.
Mythology · Ancient
Foaled from the blood of Medusa. Emblem of British Airborne Forces in WWII. The winged horse as living aircraft — the creature you negoti...
Mythology · Ancient
The original cautionary tale of flight. Wax wings, the sun, hubris, and the sea — and its 21st-century mirror, NASA's Parker Solar Probe.
Mythology · Ancient
The mytheme shared across Indian, Chinese, and Indigenous North American cultures. The world rests on the back of a turtle floating throu...