747: The Jumbo Revolution

An eccentric history buff lives in a cabin in the woods but spends most of his time flying his biplane.

A brief history of British aviation and the development of both civil and military aircraft. Made for the Festival of Britain.

Guy Martin honours the Lancaster bomber crews of World War II, as he tries out several onboard roles including pilot, gunner and bomb aimer. Has he got what it takes to join Bomber Command?

On 21 December 1988 a Pan Am 747 jet exploded over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. On the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on British soil, this is the story.

An exceptional documentary which presents, for the first time colorized archives, on Charles Lindbergh's life, the hero of the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean on May 21, 1927.

The X-15 was the last in a line of manned rocket-powered research airplanes built during the 1950s to explore ever-faster and higher flight regimes. Nineteen years before Space Shuttle, the X-15 showed it was possible to fly into, and out of, space. Launched from the wing of a modified B-52 bomber, the ship rocketed higher and faster than any manned aircraft of the time. There had never been anything like the X-15; it had a million-horsepower engine and could fly twice as fast as a rifle bullet. In the joint X-15 hypersonic research program that NASA conducted with the Air Force, the Navy, and North American Aviation the aircraft flew over a period of nearly 10 years and set unofficial speed and altitude records, in a program to investigate all aspects of piloted hypersonic flight. Information gained from the highly successful X-15 program contributed to the development of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo piloted spaceflight programs as well as the Space Shuttle program.

In hand-built, double-hulled canoes sixty feet long, the ancestors of today's Polynesians sailed vast distances using only the waves, the stars, and the flights of birds to navigate. Anthropologist Sanford Low visits the Caroline Islands of Micronesia to meet Mau Piailug, the last navigator initiated on his island and one of few men still practicing this once-essential art. He demonstrates his skill by sailing a replica canoe 2500 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti with no modern navigational instruments.

The De Havilland Comet was the world's first passenger jet airliner. But less than two years into service, two aircraft blew up in mid-air, killing all aboard. PM Winston Churchill ordered an assemblage of experts to discover what went wrong - in the process, inventing many of the air crash investigation techniques still used today.

The heroic romance of the profession is in the story about the life of test pilot Yuri Garnaev, who tragically died with his crew while extinguishing forest fires in France in 1967.

An exploration of the past and future of the steel industry in America.

A day-to-day record of the construction of the Confederation Bridge linking Prince Edward Island to the mainland, Abegweit reveals some of the innovations that made this mammoth project one of the most impressive engineering feats in Canadian history.