I bow to no one in my love of the digital. Well-done digital is, in a word, schweet.
But there is something truly special in a beautiful piece of old-school, hard-core mechanical technology. You know, back when the science of engineering was explicitly and only about the handling of actual, physical materials. To see a thing made truly fit for its purpose is to see something beautiful.
Aviation is an unforgiving science. If you screw up, it’s gonna be really ugly. It is a joy, therefore, that so many of physics equations yield tools and affordances with tremendous presence and visual style. The ways and means of flight are, more often than not, elegant—especially those that come from an era before collective committee design.
And if you are the slightest bit fond of the steampunk aesthetic, the Air & Space Museum has got your number.