Every week in aviation history holds a story worth telling. Windows of Flight explores the moments that shaped human flight — from the first machines to leave the ground, to the pilots and dreamers who pushed every boundary they found. Aviation thriller author Eric W. Ristau brings you weekly episodes covering the milestones, the firsts, the record-breakers, and the remarkable people behind them. Made for pilots, aviation history enthusiasts, and anyone who loves a great story. From the earliest aviators, the World War I and World War II to the jet age. New episodes every week.
Windows of Flight: Weekly Aviation History
Claim This Podcastby Eric W. Ristau
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8 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
Every week in aviation history holds a story worth telling. Windows of Flight explores the moments that shaped human flight — from the first machines to leave the ground, to the pilots and dreamers who pushed every boundary they found. Aviation thriller author Eric W. Ristau brings you weekly episodes covering the milestones, the firsts, the record-breakers, and the remarkable people behind them. Made for pilots, aviation history enthusiasts, and anyone who loves a great story. From the earliest aviators, the World War I and World War II to the jet age. New episodes every week.
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Publishing Since
5/8/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 6, 2026
July 5, 2026 - This Week in Aviation History Through the Windows of Flight
<p>The history of aviation is full of doors quietly opening — moments that didn't make front-page headlines at the time but changed everything that came after. The second week of July gives us three of them, spanning exactly forty years.</p><p>We start on July 8th, 1908, in Milan, Italy, where a French sculptor named Thérèse Peltier watched an exhibition flight and simply asked if she could go up. She became the first woman in recorded history to leave the ground in a powered airplane — thirty-four years old, a passenger for less than a minute, in a Voisin biplane over an Italian airfield. Three years before Harriet Quimby earned the first American woman's pilot license. Thirteen years before Bessie Coleman earned hers in France. The door had already been opened.</p><p>Then July 10th, 1938, when Howard Hughes took off from Floyd Bennett Field with a crew of four, determined to fly around the world faster than anyone in history. Four days later, he landed back in New York having covered 14,791 miles and bested Wiley Post's existing record by nearly four full days — through a flight of genuine engineering rigor that pointed directly toward the future of transoceanic aviation.</p><p>And finally, July 14th, 1948 — exactly ten years after Hughes landed — when six Royal Air Force Vampire jet fighters completed the first Atlantic crossing by jet aircraft, staging their way from England through Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland to Labrador. It happened quietly, within a military context, with three Mosquito navigators flying alongside because the jets lacked adequate instruments for overwater flight. But it proved the ocean could be crossed by jet. Everything that followed was built on that proof.</p><p>Forty years. Three doors. The whole shape of modern aviation on the other side of them.</p><p>Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at <a href="http://www.ericristau.com/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.ericristau.com</a>.</p><p><br /></p>
June 29, 2026
June 28, 2026 - This Week in Aviation History Through the Windows of Flight
<p>The history of aviation is written in moments of brilliant achievement and sudden silence. The first week of July gives us both — two milestones on Independence Day twenty years apart, and one disappearance that the world has never stopped trying to explain.</p><p>We start on July 4th, 1908, in a grape-growing town in upstate New York, where a motorcycle racer named Glenn Curtiss flew a fragile biplane called the June Bug 1,550 meters in front of witnesses who certified every foot of it. The Scientific American Trophy. The fury of the Wright brothers. And the beginning of a career that would shape American military aviation for the next decade.</p><p>Then July 4th, 1927 — nineteen years later to the day — when a sleek wooden aircraft called the Lockheed Vega lifted off from Burbank, California for the first time. No struts, no bracing wires, smooth as an egg and fifty miles per hour faster than anything else carrying passengers. Over the next decade, that aircraft and its sisters would carry Wiley Post around the world, carry Hubert Wilkins over the poles, and carry Amelia Earhart solo across the Atlantic in 1932. The Vega didn't just set records. It made records possible.</p><p>And finally, July 2nd, 1937 — when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, flying a newer Lockheed design on an around-the-world attempt, made their last radio transmissions to a Coast Guard cutter that could hear them but couldn't respond. The search covered 250,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean and found nothing. The ocean has kept its secret for nearly ninety years.</p><p>Two Independence Days. One disappearance. All of aviation between them.</p><p>Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at <a href="http://www.ericristau.com/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.ericristau.com</a>.</p><p><br /></p>
June 22, 2026
June 21, 2026 - This Week in Aviation History Through The Windows of Flight
<p>WINDOWS OF FLIGHTEpisode Summary: The Fourth Week of June</p><p>The history of aviation is full of moments when human beings looked at something that had never been done and decided to do it anyway. The fourth week of June gives us three of them — a floating hotel with mahogany paneling that became the world's first airline, two Army lieutenants who threaded a needle across the Pacific by sextant and radio, and the pilots who kept an entire city of two and a half million people alive through the longest winter of the Cold War.</p><p>We start on June 19th, 1910, in Frankfurt, Germany, where the world's first scheduled passenger airline service began — not with an airplane, but with a zeppelin. DELAG, the German Airship Travel Corporation, offered its passengers wicker chairs, mahogany paneling, large windows, and a promenade deck from which to watch the countryside slide past at forty miles an hour. Between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War, they carried more than 37,000 passengers without a single fatality. It was the future — until it wasn't.</p><p>Then June 28th, 1927, and a Fokker trimotor called the Bird of Paradise lifting off from Oakland, California with two Army lieutenants at the controls. Lester Maitland and Albert Hegenberger were pointing their aircraft at Hawaii — 2,407 miles of open Pacific with no landmarks, no alternates, and no margin for error. Hegenberger had spent two years building the radio navigation system that would guide them there. What happened when the signal faded is the kind of story that makes you appreciate every instrument approach you've ever flown.</p><p>And finally, June 26th, 1948, at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin, where a C-47 touched down with sacks of flour and the Berlin Airlift began. The Soviet Union had closed every road, rail line, and canal into the city two days earlier. Two and a half million people needed 4,500 tons of supplies every single day just to survive. The math said it couldn't be done by air. The men who flew it anyway — including a pilot named Gail Halvorsen who started dropping chocolate bars on handkerchief parachutes to the children at the fence — proved the math wrong for fifteen months straight.</p><p>Three stories. Three different ways the airplane changed what the world believed was possible.</p><p>Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at www.ericristau.com.</p><p><br></p>
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This podcast updates daily.
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