Weimar: Fear of Flying

Paul Rooney, La Décision Doypack, 2008

Charlie: Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn't mean that they are not safe.
Raymond: QANTAS. QANTAS never crashed.
Charlie: QANTAS?
Raymond: Never crashed.
Charlie: Oh that's gonna do me a lot of good because QANTAS doesn't fly to Los Angeles out of Cincinnati, you have to get to Melbourne! Melbourne, Australia in order to get the plane that flies to Los Angeles!

Barry Lewinson, Rain Man (1988)

Alex Andreev

Bo Bartlett, Tarmac

Jeffrey Milstein

Tracey Moffatt, Adventure Series No. 6, 2004

Sergey Bratkov, #1 from the series PILOTS & STEWARDESSES, 1997

Aeroflot Flight 593, a "Russian Airlines" Airbus A310-304 passenger airliner, registration F-OGQS, operating on behalf of Aeroflot, crashed into a hillside in Siberia on 23 March 1994. All 75 passengers and crew were killed. Voice and flight data recorders revealed that the pilot's 15-year-old son Eldar Kudrinsky, while seated at the controls, had unknowingly disabled the A310's autopilot's control of the ailerons, which put the aircraft into a steep bank, and then an uncontrolled dive.

Wang Xingwei, untitled (air hostess), 2005

Jonathan Wateridge, Jungle Scene With Plane Wreck, 2007

Richard Mosse, C-47 Alberta, June 2009

G. Scaccia, Il Bombardiere “Aquila Romana”, 1916

During the First World War my grandfather served as a fighter pilot in the Richthofen squadron. When I was a young boy, he told me, that many of his comrades took cocain and other drugs to sharpen their minds and to calm down their notorious fears. Still today, I envision the grand reveries of these pilots who envelopped their nerves with the white soft mat of anaesthesia and who, under the delusive shield of an artificial painlessness, infinitely alone with all the thousand images and thoughts surging out of ecstasy, drew their lonely circles high above the clouds. Maybe he fired his shots, if the encounter took place, with a sentiment of unconcern, as if this had to be done. Maybe, while he was lying in a steep curve and the wires were howling, a world of strange insights opened before him and he disposed of an endless time to finish his thoughts before he came in a position to fire again. Yes, and maybe the chain of his imaginations had just run back as the projectile hit him with that enigmatic necessity which marks the intersection of dream, sleep and awakening.

Alexander Deyneka, The knocked down ace, 1943

Dubossarsky & Vinogradov, Beuys Shooted Down, 2009

Gottfried Helnwein, Before the Crash I (Joseph Beuys) 1988

In 1942 Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. On 16 March 1944 Beuys’s Ju 87 plane crashed on the Crimean Front. The pilot was killed but Beuys, his skull broken, was found by a German search commando and brought to a military hospital where he stayed from March 17 to April 7. This incident, and Beuys’s subsequent embellishment of it, is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his artistic persona. Beuys later recounted how he had been rescued from the crash by Tartar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health.

Russian Litograph, 1914

Painting depicts aerial battle with airplanes and airships. Text underneath describes modern aerial warfare. From the Hoover Institution Russian Empire and Soviet Poster Collection.

Felix Schwormstädt, Gunners on top of a german airship, 1917

Exploding Zeppelin

Thomas Barbèy, Absolute Faith, 2000s

Leni Riefenstahl, Der Turmspringer, 1936

Martin Munkacsi, Jumping fox terrier, ca. 1930

Robert Peluce, Training Wings

Alfred Kubin, Todessprung (Salto mortale), 1901

Richard Oelze, The Expectation, 1935

Martin Miller, Mk-6 Atomic Bomb 1951

Bernard Perlin, Boss of the B-29's, Major General Curtis E. Lemay, 1945

"I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them." - Curtis Lemay

Margaret Bourke-White, Two fliers of the 8th Bomber Command clad in high altitude flying clothes, 1942

Alain Declercq, B 52, 2003

London Blitz

René Magritte, Le Drapeau noir [The Black Flag], 1937

The Black Flag' may refer to the German bombing of the small Spanish town of Guernica in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Magritte later wrote that the picture "gave a foretaste of the terror which would come from flying machines, and I am not proud of it."

Max Ernst, Garden Airplane-Trap, 1935

Clean Shave

Bee2 Bomber

Micro Air Vehicle by the Bionik Department of Berlin Technical University - Inspired by Ernst Jünger's novel "Glass Bees" - www.bionik.tu-berlin.de/institut/MAV/s2mav2.htm

Do it yourself

Mi-Mi Moscow, Siberian Postman (Frog can fly), 2005

French School, Held Aloft by Umbrellas and Butterflies, 18th Cent.

Thierry Tillier, From his series "Critique des armes flottantes"

Unusual combination of Botticelli's Venus with Heinkel He 111 WW2 bomber approaching the Norwegian coast and crashing (see next photo).

One of the few German bombers from the Luftwaffe which it is possible to dive on along the Norwegian coast is located just outside Tromsø near Buvik: The wreck of a German Heinkel 111 lwhich made an emergency landing on the 4. July 1942.

Eric Fischl, The Bed, the Chair, Jetlag, 2000

Philip Pearlstein, Model with Wooden Airplane, 2005

Ena Swansea, Theory of Relativity, 2004

Gravity Supply Co.

372 5th Avenue
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USS Los Angeles (ZR-3): In a near-vertical position, after her tail rose out-of-control while she was moored at the high mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, shortly after 1:30 PM on 25 August 1927.