Aviation Gifts: Gift Ideas For Dads

Every successful aircraft begins with a series of questions. Can it fly safely? Can it meet performance goals? Can it satisfy regulators around the world? Before passengers ever board a new aircraft, someone has to prove the answers.

For the Embraer E190, that responsibility fell to one remarkable airplane: PP-XMA, the very first E190 ever built.

Today, the Embraer E190 is a familiar sight at airports across the globe. Praised for its comfortable cabin, fuel efficiency, and versatility, it has become one of the world's most successful regional airliners. But before airlines embraced the E190, PP-XMA spent years serving as Embraer's flying laboratory, helping transform a promising design into a certified commercial aircraft.

Every PlaneTags project has its own story.

Sometimes Dave Hall and the MotoArt team spend months searching aircraft boneyards for a forgotten piece of aviation history. Other times, we're invited to help preserve an aircraft before it begins a new chapter. No two projects are ever quite the same.

Our Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster project began with a Boeing 747.

In our previous article, From Liftoff to Legacy: The Story of the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters, we explored the role Solid Rocket Boosters played in every Space Shuttle launch and introduced Aft Skirt Serial Number 13, the historic component behind our upcoming PlaneTags release.

But where exactly did this hardware fly?

According to California Science Center records, Aft Skirt 13 supported 11 Space Shuttle missions between 1982 and 2002, launching aboard missions involving Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour.

Unlike many aerospace artifacts that can be tied to a single event or mission, Aft Skirt 13 witnessed the evolution of the entire Shuttle program. Its flight history spans the early operational years of the Shuttle, the first untethered spacewalk, classified Department of Defense missions, Earth observation programs, Hubble Space Telescope servicing, and the construction of the International Space Station. By following the missions of Aft Skirt 13, we can trace the remarkable story of the Space Shuttle itself.