Thanks for sharing this, Julie. I’m a big fan and a friend of Brian’s, and I’ve been happy to see him find a small silver lining in the response to his story. Any iO9 reader that doesn’t have a copy of his “Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?” should buy one immediately. It’s a love letter to retrofuturism…

They modified the inside of an airplane to look like an airplane? And why did Cruise say anything about crashing? He’s a pilot - he knows better than that. Flying a zero-G parabola isn’t crashing by any stretch of the imagination.

I have a USB programmable doorbell that will accept just about any .wav file - the TNG chimes are tops on the list, along with the Jetsons’ doorbell.

"Success, Iosif Vissarionovich! Welcome to 2015!"

Remember when your refrigerator couldn't vote?

They've been watching; They're very disappointed.

Amazing! Pretty much like this: http://eaavideo.org/video.aspx?v=6…

No slash between "Ring" and "Silent", nor between "Home button" and "Touch ID", and incorrect spacing around the one between "Sleep" and "Wake" - it's not like Apple to make typos like that.

Very similar - the opening scene actually uses footage of two different lifting bodies, both built by Northrop: The M2-F2 and the HL-10. The X-24 came a couple of years later.

Snort is a buddy of mine, and one of the nicest guys you'd ever hope to meet. He's now a principal at Draken International, which manages a fleet of somewhere around 80 privately-owned tactical fighter aircraft on all sorts of intriguing military contracts. Draken also owns the Black Diamond Jet Team, for whom Dale…

The headline really should say "...1950s Flight Sim That Taught Cold-War Era Airmen" etc.

Good stuff otherwise.

We have a propeller from the Macon in our EAA AirVenture Museum here in Oshkohs - the size is staggering:

"However, the initial prototype could only reach 165 knots and had an endurance of just over two hours. "

The speed of sound at 36,000 feet is just about 575 knots, or 660 mph, so it would seem like you were close to breaking the "barrier." But, as you pointed out, your ground speed was 650 mph, and the sound barrier is only relevant to airspeed (not ground speed) which was much less - probably around 560 mph. Still,…

Sadly fake. The ailerons (what the video calls flaps) are set for a hard *right* bank, yet the glider flies in a shallow left bank - not possible.

The booths that we (Microsoft) used to show off Flight Simulator X at tradeshows used galley carts like this to hold demo PCs. They formed the bases of vertical kiosks made from the stabilizers of Grumman TBF Avengers.

http://www.microsoft.com/Products/Games…

The Cri-Cri flown at Paris in 2011 was far from "the world's first all-electric airplane." Several other types had flown much earlier, as far back as the early '70s.

You almost can't talk about British VTOL airliner projects without mentioning the magnificent (and insanely loud, unfortunately) Fairey Rotodyne.