Celebrate Leap Day With A Look Back At Our Feb. 29 Issues

Leap days are pretty rare, of course, coming only once every four years.

But when you publish a weekly magazine that’s dated on Mondays, Leap Day issues happen much less often -- every 28 years to be exact. Today is only the third Leap Day on which we have published an issue in our 100-year history.

The last leap day when we published an issue fell in 1988, a little more than six months before I joined Aviation Week & Space Technology. The cover featured a rendering of Space Industries’ Industrial Space Facility flying in formation with the planned U.S./international space station.

Articles in the issue included a report by Michael A. Dornheim about McDonnell Douglas starting demonstration flights of an MD-80 powered by ultrahigh-bypass-ratio engines. He found the promised low noise levels “have been met or bettered.” Another article by Craig Covault said the Soviets were studying a Mars return vehicle and a mission to Saturn that would expand on their balloon/rover mission to the Red Planet. Finally, an article by Edward H. Phillips said the FAA was receiving lots of negative reaction to its proposal for increased use of Mode C altitude-reporting equipment in controlled airspace.

Twenty-eight years earlier, as the Space Age was in its infancy, the Feb. 29, 1960, issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology featured a Douglas Nike Zeus rocket launch on the cover.

An article said more than half the $676 million in new construction projects requested by the U.S. Air Force for fiscal 1961 would go to build operational missile facilities.

And Space Technology Editor Craig Lewis wrote that the House of Representatives had approved a $23 million supplementary provision for NASA to keep Project Mercury on schedule. The money went to pay for research and development on the Mercury capsule, the spacecraft tracking network and upgrades to Atlas Pad 12 at the Atlantic Missile Range to accommodate the Agena-B upper stage.

There was a Leap Day in 1932. But alas, our predecessor magazine Aviation was a monthly at the time, so there was no Feb. 29 issue.