On December 12, 1955, English engineer Christopher Cockerell filed the patent for his new invention, the hovercraft, a craft capable of traveling over land, water, mud or ice and other surfaces both at speed and when stationary.
On April 29, 1785, German inventor Karl Drais was born, who invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), also later called the velocipede or draisine, also nicknamed the dandy horse
On October 8, 1839, George Stephenson's steam locomotive 'The Rocket' won The Rainhill Trials, an important competition in the early days of steam locomotive railways, run in Rainhill, Lancashire (now Merseyside) for the nearly completed Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
Efficient fleet utilization is one of the key factors in an airline’s success and profitability. In this section, the Airline Data Project (ADP) demonstrates how mainline carriers have improved the use of their fleets and how the hub-and-spoke carriers achieve lower fleet utilization than their low-cost counterparts. While network architecture explains some of the differences, the age of a carrier’s fleet also is a significant factor.