Browsing: Travel

A Brief History On December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight of a human piloted aircraft flown by Orville Wright was marked by another aviation first, that being the first supersonic flight by a human piloted aircraft that was built by a private company when SpaceShipOne, piloted by Brian Binnie achieved Mach 1.2 in a rocket powered test flight to a lofty altitude of 20.67 kilometers (almost 68,000 feet).  SpaceShipOne is a privately developed space plane designed to take passengers into suborbital space flight, space being defined as at an altitude of at least 100 kilometers. …

A Brief History On November 19, 1911, the infamous “Doom Bar” located at the mouth of the River Camel in Cornwall, England where it empties into the Celtic Sea claimed another pair of ships, sinking both.  The Island Maid and Angele both had run aground on the permanent sandbar, formerly known as the less poetic “Dunbar sands,” killing everyone aboard the Angele except, oddly enough, the captain.  As can be expected by the demonstrative name, the Doom Bar is infamous for causing the sinking or grounding of many ships over the years. The River Camel estuary serves as access to…

A Brief History On November 17, 1858, Denver, Colorado, the town that bills itself as “The Mile High City” because of its elevation of 5280 feet above sea level, exactly one US mile, was founded.  Denver became the capital of the State of Colorado when Colorado was admitted to the Union as the 38th State in 1876, and today the Denver metropolitan area has fully one half of all of Colorado’s population.  A “Big League City” today, Denver boasts the Major League (National League) Rockies of baseball, the Broncos of the National Football League, the Nuggets of the National Basketball…

A Brief History On October 25, 1999, American golfing professional Payne Stewart was on a Learjet chartered to fly from Florida to Texas, when the jet apparently lost pressurization (air rapidly leaked out of the plane) causing all on board, including the pilots, to pass out. Or the jet failed to ever properly pressurize in the first place. The pilot-less jet continued on a 1500 mile flight with no one on board regaining consciousness.  When the jet ran out of fuel over South Dakota, it fell uncontrolled out of the sky and crashed.  All aboard the Learjet were dead, probably…

A Brief History On October 13, 1792, the cornerstone for the White House was laid in the capital city of the United States, known as Washington, D.C. (the city of Washington within the District of Columbia).  While commonly referred to as “The White House” (because it is white?), the real name of the presidential residence is the United States Executive Mansion. A well known residence throughout the world, in the US the “White House” is a term often used synonymously with “the President” or “the Administration.”  Around the world there are similar iconic residences of national leaders, and today we…