OK… maybe in 1919… but this bad boy is a bucket of bolts compaired to what the military is crancking out now.  Check out the lastest images of the world’s fastest Plane:

The Worlds Fastest Manned Aircraft

X-43 is designed by NASA as a part of its Hyper-X program. Initially they were designed to achieve speeds greater then 5400 miles per hour. They are supposed to fly at the altitudes of 100,000 feet or more. Scramjets operate only at hypersonic speeds. The launch of the NASA X-43A was also special, it was launched from a specially modified B-52 Stratofortress Bomber Airplane.

The Worlds Fastest Un-Manned Aircraft

 

According to NASA records X-43 is the fastest unmanned airplane in the world. X-43 is said to have reached about 7000 miles per hour.

Area 51: Hype vs. Reality

 

In the October Popular Science, veteran aviation journo Bill Sweetman writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at the Air Force’s remote Groom Lake test facility in Nevada, a.k.a. Area 51. Sweetman describes three demonstrators unveiled in recent years — the Northrop Grumman Tacit Blue and Boeing Bird of Prey manned stealth planes and the Lockheed Martin Polecat drone — but insists these are just consolation prizes offered up by a military that is keeping its major black airplane programs under wraps.