Airplanes Coloring Pages
Welcome to my printable Airplane coloring pages section!
Airplanes are machines designed for flight, carrying passengers and cargo across cities, countries, and oceans. From early biplanes made of wood and fabric to modern jets built from lightweight metals and advanced composites, aviation has changed the way people travel and connect around the world. Airplanes take off using powerful engines and lift created by their wings, a design inspired by the physics of air and motion.
Jump to: Airplanes | Types of Planes | History
Airplanes
Types of Planes
Floats let a seaplane land on a lake, while a ramp lets a cargo plane load a truck. A plane's job decides what it looks like.
Business Jet
Business jets are smaller than airliners and carry only a few passengers, so they can land at small airports that big planes can't use.
Seaplane
A seaplane lands on water with floats instead of wheels, so a calm lake can be its runway.
Cargo Plane
Military cargo planes often have a rear ramp that lowers so trucks and supplies can roll straight inside.
Seaplane on the Water
Pilots in places like northern Canada and Alaska fly seaplanes to fishing camps and cabins that no road reaches.
Light Sport Aircraft
Light sport aircraft are limited to two seats and a low weight, which is why many pilots fly them for fun on weekends.
Air Force One
Air Force One is the call sign of any Air Force plane with the President of the United States on board. The planes used today are specially built Boeing 747s.
Jetfire (Transformers)
Jetfire can turn into a powerful jet, but he wasn't always a fighter. Before that he was a scientist who studied the stars, and he's still known for his brains as much as his bravery...
The Mach Loop (Wales)
Fighter jets from several countries practise low flying in a set of tight valleys in Wales, and the best views are from the hillsides above, where watchers often look down on the planes as they roar past.
A Short History of Planes
More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with drawings of flying machines. One was an ornithopter, a machine with wings that flapped like a bird's, which its pilot would work with pedals and levers. As far as anyone knows, none of his machines ever flew in his lifetime, but his drawings show how long people dreamed of it.
Hot Air Balloon
In 1783 a sheep and two birds became the first passengers in a hot air balloon, floating above a crowd at the French king's palace. Two months later two people climbed in too. Balloons could go up but not where anyone wanted, so inventors turned to gliders with wings and, eventually, engines.
Hot Air Balloon coloring pages
On a windy beach in North Carolina in 1903, two brothers who ran a bicycle shop got an engine-powered airplane off the ground. Orville Wright lay flat on the lower wing of the Wright Flyer and flew for 12 seconds, a distance of about 120 feet (37 metres). That's shorter than the wingspan of a jumbo jet, but it was the first time a person had flown a powered airplane under control.
Just over ten years later, on New Year's Day 1914, the world's first scheduled airline began flying across Tampa Bay in Florida. Its planes were flying boats that landed on the water, and each one carried a single paying passenger on a trip of about 23 minutes.
When World War I started later that year, armies first used planes to scout from above, and designers soon made them faster and tougher. Most were biplanes, with two wings stacked on top of each other so a light wooden frame covered in fabric could still lift the plane. Afterwards, pilots flew leftover biplanes from fair to fair, giving rides and doing stunts for crowds.
In 1927 Charles Lindbergh flew alone from New York to Paris without stopping, a trip of about 33 hours in a plane called the Spirit of St. Louis. Five years later Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Both flights showed that planes could cross oceans.
Airlines grew quickly in the 1930s, and flying got more comfortable. In 1930 the first flight attendants were hired, and they were nurses who looked after nervous passengers. A few years later came the DC-3, a sturdy two-engine plane that became the first to earn money for its airline by carrying passengers alone.
During World War II, American factories built hundreds of thousands of planes, and many of the workers were women. Riveting was teamwork, with one person pressing a rivet gun against the metal while a partner held a heavy bar behind it, and the nickname Rosie the Riveter came to stand for all of them. Some women also flew the finished planes from the factory to the air bases.
Rosie the Riveter Coloring Pages
Most planes still had propellers until jets arrived. Engineers in Britain and Germany built the first jet engines in the late 1930s, which push a plane forward by blowing hot gas out the back, and the first jet planes flew soon after. In 1952 the first jet airliner, the Comet, began carrying passengers in Britain, and jets could fly higher and much faster than propeller planes.
In 1970 the Boeing 747 began carrying passengers, and it was so much bigger than other airliners that people called it the jumbo jet. With a hump at the front for an upper deck, it could carry hundreds of passengers at once, which helped bring fares down.
Some people wanted to fly higher than any airplane could. In 1961 the first person flew into space, and from 1981 to 2011 the space shuttle launched like a rocket, circled Earth and then glided back to land on a runway like an airplane. It was a little of both, a spaceship that came home like a plane.
Modern Space Vehicles coloring pages
Airplanes spend their days in the best colors the sky has to offer. They climb through morning pink into a wide blue, slip past clouds as white as whipped cream, and glow copper and gold when the sun sets behind their wings. Up high, their engines leave long white trails that fade in the cold air like chalk on a blue board.
At night a plane becomes a small string of lights, red on one wing and green on the other, crossing a sky of deep navy and silver stars. Somewhere below, someone looks up to watch it go and wonders where it's headed.
