Daily Kos: Kossack Air Force

WAAAM: 1936-1939 airplanes (museum tour)

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Friday May 08, 2020 · 8:30 AM PDT

2020/05/08 · 08:30

The Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum (WAAAM) in Hood River, Oregon, has on display more than 100 antique airplanes. Shown below are some of the 1936-1939 airplanes which are on display. The drip pans under most of the planes indicate that this is a functioning aircraft.

Icons of Aviation History: The SPAD 13

Lenny Flank for Kossack Air Force

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Thursday May 07, 2020 · 12:32 PM PDT

2020/05/07 · 12:32

The SPAD 13 was one of the best Entente fighters produced during World War One, and was flown by some of the top French and American aces, including Rene Fonck, Raoul Lufbery, and Eddie Rickenbacker.

“Icons of Aviation History” is a diary series that explores significant and historic aircraft.

DSCN3879 — SPAD 13 on exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

In 1915, the French company SPAD (Société Pour l'Aviation et ses Dérives) introduced an important innovation. Until then, most aircraft were powered by air-cooled rotary engines. SPAD was one of the first to take advantage of a new liquid-cooled V-8 engine: the Hispano-Suiza V-8 with 150 horsepower. In 1916, the SPAD 7 fighter was introduced into French service, and did very well against German Albatros D models. In all, some 5500 SPAD 7s flew in the war.

By early 1917, SPAD was working on an improved version. A larger and more powerful Hispano-Suiza V-8 of 200 horsepower had just become available, and the new fighter was designed around it. The new design was bigger, faster, and carried two cowl-mounted machine guns. It was christened the SPAD 13. The first prototype entered flight testing in April 1917.

It turned out to be a superior fighter, particularly the later versions with more powerful Hispano-Suiza engines. The rounded fuselage reduced drag, so at 135mph it was faster than the Germans, while its twin Vickers machine guns gave it equal firepower. The wings had no dihedral, however, which made it less maneuverable, and it had a tendency to stall at low speeds. The early V-8 engines also had reliability issues (and unlike the SE5a, which could be landed with the power turned off, the SPAD fell like a rock if the engine went out). Though the heavier SPAD was less nimble than the German Albatros, it had a higher rate of climb and could also outdive them to get away from trouble. SPAD pilots learned that the best strategy was to avoid a turning dogfight, and to use their superior vertical performance to dive down on the Germans, make an attack, then dive away to climb for another attack.

The first SPADs began reaching the front in June, and once production difficulties with the Hispano-Suiza engine were solved, the French began churning it out in large numbers. Before the end of 1917, eight different companies were manufacturing the new fighters under license, most French fighter squadrons had been equipped with SPAD 13s, and the aircraft had also been adopted by Belgium, Italy and Russia—even the British flew several squadrons of SPADs. When the US began deploying substantial forces in France, they were at first given Nieuport fighters, but by 1918 these were replaced with SPADs. The Americans also preferred to substitute their French-made 30-caliber Vickers machine guns with American-made Martin 30-06 versions. In total, 893 SPAD 13s were flown by the Americans, equipping all but one of the 16 aero squadrons. By the end of the war, a new version with a 300-horsepower engine, known as the SPAD 20, was in the works.

The SPAD 13 became the preferred plane of some of the war’s best fighter pilots. Georges Guynemer, Rene Fonck and Eddie Rickenbacker all scored most of their victories in SPADs. Guynemer had become an ace flying SPAD 7s and continued with SPAD 13s, ending with a score of 54. Rickenbacker became the highest-scoring ace on the American side, with 26 victories. French pilot Rene Fonck, with 75 victories, finished the war as the highest-scoring surviving ace: only the Red Baron Manfred von Richthofen, killed in 1917, scored higher.

In all, some 8500 SPAD 13s were produced during the war. Today, only six examples remain. One of these is in the collection of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and is displayed in the World War One gallery. This aircraft was made in August 1918 at the Kellner Brothers Piano Company (woodworkers and cabinet-makers were often pressed into service as airplane manufacturers) and was assigned to the American 22^nd Aero Squadron. It is painted in the markings of six-victory air ace Ray Brooks, who scored one of his victories while flying this particular plane. At the end of the war the SPAD went on tour as part of a war bond drive, and was given to the Smithsonian in December 1919. It was completely restored in 1985.

The SPAD 13 on exhibit at the Air Force Museum in Dayton was also built by the Kellner Brothers, in October 1918, but it entered service too late to see combat. Instead it went to San Diego, had its engine replaced with an American 150-horsepower Wright version of the Hispano-Suiza, and served as a patrol craft and trainer. It is displayed in the markings of Eddie Rickenbacker’s “Hat-in-the-Ring” squadron. The Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix AZ has a SPAD 13 that was pieced together from at least three different aircraft.

The Musee de l’Air in Paris has a SPAD on display, as does the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces in Brussels. The Memorial Flight Association in Paris also has a wartime SPAD 13, the oldest one still in existence. Serial number 4377 was produced in February 1918 by Kellner Brothers: it was found in pieces in an attic in France in 1970. Restored, it is today the only airworthy SPAD 13.

NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)

A crash then, a crash now

Nolana

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Wednesday May 06, 2020 · 6:29 PM PDT

2020/05/06 · 18:29

On July 19, 1989, United Airlines flight 232 was flying from Denver to Chicago. It was a DC-10 with 296 passengers and crew on board. The captain was Al Haynes; his co-pilot was William Records. The flight engineer was Dudley Dvorak.

As the jet flew over Iowa, the fan disk of the tail-mounted #2 engine shattered due to a tiny metallurgical flaw that had caused a microscopic crack to develop and grow over time. The pieces of titanium shrapnel ripped through the engine housing and cut all three hydraulic lines, causing every drop of hydraulic fluid to drain away, leaving the pilots with no way to steer the plane.

Riding along as a passenger was Dennis Fitch, a DC-10 instructor, who had actually been doing simulator flights regarding steering with throttles alone. He offered to assist when he realized the plane was in trouble, and Capt. Haynes gladly accepted. The four pilots, principally Haynes and Fitch, managed to use careful control of the throttles to recover a modicum of control, and spiraled the plane down toward Sioux City, the nearest airport. Since they had to maintain a pretty high speed in order to steer with throttles, they came in to land at a much higher speed than was normally safe, and as they reduced speed just before touching down, the plane tilted to the right, and the wing hit the ground. The plane smacked into the runway and broke apart, a wing tumbling away, the rear and the cockpit tearing off, the main part of the fuselage coming to a stop upside down. There was, of course, fire. Anyone seeing footage of the crash would assume that everyone had been killed.

112 people were killed, but 184 survived, many walking away relatively uninjured. None of them would have had a chance without the brave, intelligent and calm pilots. They kept that plane from falling out of the sky like a rock.

184 people survived an impossible situation, and a violent crash, because those pilots gave them a chance to survive. But in interviews through years afterward, those pilots felt as though they had not done enough, because they couldn’t save everyone. Dennis Fitch, especially, suffered from terrible guilt because 112 people had not walked away.

Contrast these pilots to the thing in the Oval Office now, and the parasitic band of sycophants he has around him. Compare this country to that stricken airliner. The pandemic has shattered the engine and destroyed the ability to steer. Is there a steady hand on the throttles, an intelligent mind assessing the situation and devising a plan to try to save us, a calming voice on the radio? Of course there is not. Trump is congratulating himself that “only” 70,000 American citizens have died, and he’ll still feel pleased with himself if “only” that many more dead are added to the list.

Dennis Fitch openly wept because he couldn’t save everyone. He wasn’t even supposed to be flying the plane that day, and he took that burden of guilt upon himself because he was a good man.

Trump thinks the pandemic, and the mass graves, and the packed hospitals, and screamingly high unemployment numbers, are all a plot to insult him. “I take no responsibility,” he says.

I wish we had people like those pilots leading us now.

Hidden History: Britain's Civilian Aircraft Carriers

Lenny Flank for History for Kossacks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday May 05, 2020 · 1:34 PM PDT

2020/05/05 · 13:34

During the height of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2, the British defended their vital supply convoys against German U-boats with civilian cargo ships that had been fitted with flight decks to carry military aircraft.

"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.

merchant aircraft carrier Mv_alexia — Merchant Aircraft Carrier “Alexia” photo from Wikicommons

In early 1940, the Second World War was not going well for England. The Nazis had already overrun much of Europe, and would soon take France out of the war. Nazi U-boats were running rampant in the Atlantic, and were sinking British supply ships running between North America and Europe at a rate that threatened to starve the islands of supplies. While the Americans and Canadians were able to provide air cover for convoys leaving their ports and the Royal Air Force could protect the ships once they arrived in English waters, there was a huge gap in the middle of the Atlantic where land-based aircraft could not reach, leaving the convoys vulnerable to German submarines.

In desperation, the British Admiralty studied the idea of a “merchant aircraft carrier”—fitting an ordinary cargo ship with a flat flight deck which would make her capable of launching a small number of aircraft to defend the convoy. As an experiment, the captured German freighter Hannover was converted into a makeshift mini-carrier in 1941, entering service as HMS Audacity in June. But while the concept proved to be workable, with as many as 50 convoys crossing the Atlantic at any given time it quickly became obvious that the UK simply did not have sufficient resources to produce enough of these “carriers” to do the job.

Then in December 1941 the United States entered the war, and with her virtually unlimited industrial capacity, she became the answer to the problem. American shipyards began work on producing a new class of “escort carriers”—sometimes dubbed “jeep carriers”—to serve as convoy escorts. These would be much smaller than the big fleet carriers and would hold only a handful of planes, just enough to protect the convoy from submarines, surface raiders, and bombers.

But even the industrial might of the US could only move so fast, and given the other urgent priorities—not the least of which was producing the simple “Liberty” cargo ships as rapidly as possible—it soon became apparent that it would be some time before escort carriers could be put into service in large numbers. A stopgap expedient was urgently needed.

It was the British who then resurrected the idea of the “merchant aircraft carrier” or MAC. There were doubts about the sturdiness of merchant ship hulls, and it was also feared that the civilian ships were too slow and too short to safely launch modern aircraft. But as the Battle of the Atlantic worsened in 1942, desperation won out, and it was decided to modify members of two classes of merchant ship—bulk grain carriers and fuel tankers—as makeshift aircraft carriers. At around 420 feet long and a speed of 15 knots, they were (just barely) sufficient for launching the aging biplane Swordfish naval torpedo bombers.

To make the conversion process as simple and rapid as possible, only the barest minimum modifications were made. The fuel tankers had their pilothouse and funnels removed and were fitted with a flight deck that ran the length of the ship. They carried three Swordfish that were stored out on the open deck (theoretically they could carry four planes, but this became too cramped). The grain carriers carried four Swordfish, which could be stored below, with wings folded, in a cargo compartment that had been modified into a hangar. An elevator was added to carry the planes up to the flight deck. Even with all these modifications, the grain ship/aircraft carrier was still able to carry about two-thirds of her normal cargo load. The modified fuel tankers, which lacked an internal hangar, only lost about ten percent of their cargo capacity (mostly for aviation gas tanks and ordinance bunkers for the Swordfish’s depth charges, machine guns and torpedoes).

The first two MACs, converted from new bulk grain freighters that were already under construction, entered service in April 1943. In accordance with British practice, they were given names that began with “Empire” (indicating that they were under the control of the British Ministry of War Transport) and ended with another name that began with “Mac” (for Merchant Aircraft Carrier)—so they were dubbed Empire MacAlpine and Empire MacAndrew. Four more entered service over the next ten months.

The converted fuel tankers, meanwhile, were delayed as the Royal Navy raised safety concerns: fuel tankers, after all, carried huge amounts of gasoline, oil and aviation fuel and were essentially floating bombs. In the end, however, expediency won out—the fuel tankers were cheaper and faster to convert than the grain ships. By October 1943 the first fuel tanker MAC, Empire MacKay, entered service, followed over the next few weeks by three more. All of these were modified from new tanker hulls that were already under construction.

Despite this desperate effort, however, it was still not enough, and the Admiralty decided that the fastest way to obtain more MACs would be to find existing cargo ships that were of sufficient size and speed, withdraw them from convoy service, and add flight decks to them. The best available ships for the task were the “Triple Twelve” oil tankers (known as Rapana class) operated by the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Dutch Royal Shell. In response, the British subsidiary offered its entire fleet of eight tankers for conversion, and its Dutch parent company offered all three of its “Triple Twelves”. In total, nine of these would be converted into MACs (they would all retain their civilian names upon entering service). Two of these, Gadila and Macoma, were operated by crews from Holland under the Dutch flag.

Legally, none of the 19 MACs that entered service were owned by the British or Dutch Navies and none were listed on the official Navy rosters—they remained registered as civilian cargo ships with merchant marine crews and officers. But the Swordfish aircraft were maintained and flown by uniformed active-duty Navy pilot officers and ground crew (who made up around half of the MAC’s complement). Since these aircraft were fully armed and had the open mission of attacking hostile submarines and ships, it was obvious that despite the legal fiction of civilian ownership these were military vessels—and this produced a legal quagmire. Under international law, non-uniformed civilians who take up weapons are not considered as “combatants” and are not accorded the legal rights and protections provided by the Conventions on the rules of war: if captured they have no rights as a POW and can be arrested and executed as ordinary criminals.

The Royal Navy at first intended to man the merchant carriers with military personnel and list the ships as official war vessels, but the harsh reality was that there simply were not enough sailors available. London therefore tried its best to hide from the Germans the fact that the MAC ships, despite looking and acting like Navy carriers, were actually civilian, and it is not even clear how aware the merchant marine crews themselves were of their precarious legal situation.

In the end, the Royal Navy considered the MACs to be a success. While none of the Swordfish aircraft operating from the civilian carriers ever sunk a German U-boat, losses from convoys that were escorted by a MAC were relatively light, and post-war accounts from German submariners indicated that they feared the little aircraft carriers and would usually withdraw if they saw one. None of the civilian MACs were lost or damaged, though the original British Navy mini-carrier, HMS Audacity, was sunk on convoy duty in 1941.

By mid-1944 the United States was finally beginning to turn out large numbers of escort carriers, and the civilian MACs became unnecessary. Four of them were withdrawn in 1944 and refitted back into civilian cargo ships. The rest were mostly used to ferry new aircraft across the Atlantic. Although some thought was given to sending the mini-carriers to the Pacific, none were ever assigned there. When the European War ended in May 1945, the remaining MACs were released from service and reconverted to merchant ships. Today, none of them survives.

NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)

Air-Minded: Tailhooks & Wing Landings

pwoodford

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday May 05, 2020 · 12:21 PM PDT

2020/05/05 · 12:21

A couple of recent stories in the news caught my eye and brought back memories.

https___api.thedrive.com_wp-content_uploads_2020_05_f-15-nose-top — Photo credit: unknown

The first story was about an Oregon Air Guard F-15 that ran off the runway at Andrews AFB, Virginia (oops, I mean Maryland — pwoodford), after an emergency landing last Saturday. Here’s an interesting detail from the news report on the incident: “Second-hand reports state that the brakes and steering failed and that the pilot missed the arresting cable/barrier or the hook did not otherwise engage it. The right main landing gear also collapsed.”

The Eagle has redundant hydraulic systems. In general, if one fails others take over, but there's an exception, and that is the Utility A system. It operates, among other things, the landing gear, nosewheel steering, and brakes, the stuff you need to land and taxi back to the chocks. The procedure, should you experience Utility A failure, is to declare an emergency, lower the landing gear by pulling the emergency extension handle, drop the tailhook, touch down on the first brick, and take the approach end cable. The cable will stop you right now, like landing on a carrier. Should you miss the cable and find yourself rolling down the runway at 150 knots with no brakes or steering, there's another handle you can pull, but the stopping and steering it gives you is limited ... there should be just enough to bring you to a stop straight ahead on the runway. They'll have to tow you in from there. Oh, and with emergency braking there's no anti-skid, so you're probably going to blow the tires getting the jet stopped.

So yeah, Utility A failure is kind of a big deal, but it's not rare either. Still, it's not every day you have to use the tailhook to keep from running off the runway.

I don't know what happened here, but it sure seems like Utility A failure and a missed cable. Perhaps, after missing the cable, the emergency accumulator pressure ran out before the pilot could finish stopping straight ahead; in any case he or she ran off the runway and into the dirt, which appears to have snapped the other landing gear struts.

When the Eagle was new emergency gear lowering worked as advertised. As the jets got older, though, occasionally one of the main landing gear struts wouldn't lock in the down position. You'd still get three green lights in the cockpit, but one of the mains might collapse once weight was on the wheel. You wouldn't know until it happened.

I was present at one of the first such incidents in the F-15. It happened in 1985 at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska. My wingman and I were flying back to base after a training sortie. About twenty miles out he radioed that his Utility A hydraulics had failed. I declared an emergency with tower and let them know my wingman would be taking the cable. Knowing that after he did so the runway would be closed until ground crews could tow him off and reset the cable, we held north of the field until other aircraft in the pattern had landed. Then we split up and I landed first, with him in trail a mile or two behind.

He did everything right, but immediately upon touchdown, just short of the cable, the left main began to fold and his jet swerved left. The hook caught the cable and brought him to a stop, but he wound up half off the runway with one wingtip dug into the dirt. Not knowing what had happened, or if anything else was about to turn to shit, he blew the canopy and did an emergency egress over the low side. Later, similar incidents began to happen with other old Eagles ... not often, but often enough to warrant training F-15 pilots to anticipate the possibility of a main gear collapse when landing with Utility A failure.

Over the course of my F-15 career I took the cable with Utility A failure twice, once in daylight in Japan, once in pitch darkness at RAAF Darwin in Australia. When the tailhook hits the runway at night it throws up an impressive rooster tail of sparks, as in this photo of an CF-18 Hornet just before it engages the cable:

DP792PrUQAAC3RW — Photo copyright 2017 by Patrick Cardinal

That night at Darwin, the sparks were so bright in the canopy mirrors I had to look down into my lap to keep my night vision, and later that night the RAAF tower controllers sent a case of Victoria Bitters to my hotel room as thanks for putting on a great show.

Besides those two emergency landings I snagged the cable on three other occasions, not because there was anything wrong with the airplane but because the runway I was landing on was covered in ice and it was the only way to stop safely. In total, five cable engagements in nearly 2,000 hours in the jet, more than enough for me, probably about average for F-15 pilots in general.

I don't know why the pilot here missed the cable and don't want to speculate. Nor do I know why he or she ran off the runway after missing the cable, unless there was something wrong with the emergency braking and steering system. In any case, the airframe appears undamaged and the jet will likely fly again.

The second story, reported yesterday in the Air Force Times, brings back memories of practicing formation landings in pilot training at Vance AFB in Oklahoma.

TalonCrash_20 — T-38 crash at Vance AFB, OK, Nov 21, 2019 (photo: Enid News & Eagle)

The crash occurred in November 2019 at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma, the base where I was first a student pilot and later an instructor. Two T-38s landed side by side in formation. Student pilots were flying in the front seats, their instructors in the back. At touchdown the student in the number two jet pulled back on the stick to aerobrake. He saw he was drifting toward the left side of the runway and applied right rudder to correct. Accident investigators think both the student and instructor were on the controls by that point. In the event, their jet hit the lead jet, became airborne again, rolled over lead, and impacted the grass to the right of the runway upside down, killing both the student and instructor. The lead aircraft, damaged, rolled off the right side of the runway as well, but the student and instructor in that T-38 were unharmed.

The official accident report, recently released, placed blame on the instructor in the second aircraft for not reacting quickly enough to the student's error. The part of the story I'm thinking about, the main subject of the Air Force Times article, is about the family of the student who was killed, who want the Air Force to stop teaching formation landings in pilot training, calling them, per the article, a “'dangerous and wholly unnecessary maneuver' that provides no practical benefit, no longer practiced by front-line combat pilots."

Naturally I feel for the dead student's family. By the point at which he was practicing formation landings in the T-38, he was nearing the end of pilot training, about to graduate and put on his wings. Moreover, if he was flying the T-38, that meant he'd been selected for fighters or bombers ... the elite among student pilots. Surely it was a sudden, out-of-the-blue loss, and I can see where his family would think it a senseless one.

But wing landings aren't senseless at all, nor are they "no longer practiced by front-line combat aircraft." I practiced them as a student in both the T-37 and T-38, and later, as a T-37 instructor, taught student after student to do them safely. Once I started flying F-15s, wing landings were almost an everyday occurrence, as they are for all fighter and attack aircrews. Many a radio- or instrument-out wingman has been brought safely home on lead's wing, taken all the way to touchdown in the worst sort of weather, with low ceilings and poor visibility, conditions that would have prevented them from ever finding their way home. This has been true forever, and will stay so.

More to the point is something my pilot buddies and I asked one another in November 2019 when we first heard about the accident at Vance AFB: "Have you ever heard of anyone crashing during a wing landing, even in pilot training?" The answer, from everyone I know, was "no." We've been training student pilots to land on the wing from WWI to the present day, routinely doing them in combat aircraft even longer ... and doing it safely.

The dead student's parents said one thing I heartily agree with, though. They " ... called on the Air Force to speed up the process for replacing the T-38 — which the Air Force began using for training in 1961 — with the T-7A Red Hawk."

Damn straight. The last T-38s were built in 1972, making the youngest ones nearly 50 years old. Not only that: designed as they were to train pilots to fly Century-series fighters like the F-104, T-38s are unforgiving to fly, particularly at low speeds and high angles of attack. Frankly I can't believe the Air Force is still using them in pilot training, and the sooner we get the T-7s on line, the better.

Stonehenge Air Museum: Monoplanes (photo diary)

Ojibwa for Kossack Air Force

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Friday May 01, 2020 · 8:30 AM PDT

2020/05/01 · 08:30

The Stonehenge Air Museum is located in a residential area near the golf course in Fortine, Montana. This small museum contains about two dozen vintage aircraft, including some one-of-a-kind planes. Shown below are some of the monoplanes which are on display in the museum.

Icons of Aviation History: Mikoyan-Guryevich MiG-3

Lenny Flank for Kossack Air Force

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday April 30, 2020 · 12:23 PM PDT

2020/04/30 · 12:23

The Soviet MiG-3 was designed as a fast high-altitude interceptor, but this was not the type of war it ended up fighting.

“Icons of Aviation History” is a diary series that explores significant and historic aircraft.

MiG-3, Military Aviation Museum in Virginia

As with so much of Soviet aviation history, the story of the MiG-3 revolves around politics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union, like many other countries, assumed that air combat in any future war would be much like air combat had been in the First World War: it would center around ground support for the infantry and would take place at low altitude. A few visionaries were touting the air power of the strategic bomber, but in Russia this was dismissed—planners believed that the vast distances inside the USSR made strategic bombing too difficult.

In the Spanish Civil War, however, the world saw firsthand the real potential of the long-distance high-altitude bomber, and now many countries, including the Soviet Union, scrambled to put together a defense. In 1939, the Polikarpov design bureau submitted a design for a fast interceptor that could climb quickly to great height and intercept incoming bombers. Polikarpov’s previous fighter designs, the I-15 biplane and the I-15 monoplane, had used radial engines, but when the Soviet-built supercharged Mikulin AM-37 inline engine was introduced, he decided to build his new fighter around it, fitting the engine into the smallest possible airframe. To save weight and also as part of Stalin’s directive to use as little scarce aircraft aluminum as possible, the front of the fuselage was framed with steel tube, while the tail and wings were plywood. The result was the I-200, which he estimated could reach speeds of 410mph.

Then, in August, Polikarpov, who had already been arrested and confined in a prison labor camp a few years before, once again fell out of political favor with Stalin. Stalin set up a new division inside Polikarpov’s design bureau which was designated the Experimental Construction Section, headed by two promising young aircraft engineers named Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Guryevich. First the I-200 project was taken away from Polikarpov and reassigned to Mikoyan and Guryevich (and renamed the MiG-1), and later in 1940 the pair were given control of the entire design bureau, which was also renamed MiG.

Mikoyan and Guryevich would later go on to design some of the best-known jet fighters of the Cold War, but for now they were stuck with the MiG-1 design that had been largely done by Polikarpov. The planned Mikulin AM-37 engine turned out to be unreliable and was never produced, so Mikoyan and Guryevich switched to the less powerful but available AM-35A V-12 instead. The prototype first flew in April 1940, and despite the smaller engine still reached over 400mph at altitude and could climb to 23,000 feet in 7 minutes. Test flights revealed a number of issues including poor visibility and a tendency to stall and spin, but Stalin was anxious to defend against a potential German attack, and ordered the MiG-1 into production anyway.

Mikoyan and Guryevich, meanwhile, were already working on modifications. To improve stability, they moved the engine forward by four inches and increased the dihedral on the outer wings by one degree. The radiator was replaced by a more efficient design, and an additional gas tank was added to increase the range. Armor plate was added to the pilot’s seat, and self-sealing coatings were added to the gas tanks.

All of this added weight degraded the plane’s performance somewhat, but it was still faster than the German Me-109 and the British Spitfire, and was the best interceptor that was available. Stalin ordered that production of the MiG-1 end after just 100 planes, and that manufacture of the new MiG-3 begin. The planes began to enter service in 1941. By the time the Nazis invaded Russia in June, the Soviets had deployed almost 1,000 MiG-3s.

Most of these were destroyed on the ground at the beginning of the attack. The ones which survived found that the bulk of their combat missions were taking place at low altitudes against ground attacks, and that was not what the MiG had been designed for. Low to the ground, the MiGs were less maneuverable than the Germans. Its armament of two .30-caliber machine guns and one .50-caliber was inferior to the Me-109s with their 20mm cannon. To add more firepower, the Soviets added another .50-cal under the wing in a pod, but this reduced the speed, so most pilots removed it. The gunsight was also found to be inaccurate, forcing pilots to get in close and fire from pointblank range. Over time the Russians tried a variety of different engines and armament on the airframe, but none of them could solve the basic problem—the MiG-3 was trying to do a job that it had not been intended to do.

By the end of 1942, the Yak-3 had become available, and the remaining MiG-3s were pulled from frontline squadrons and relegated to rear-area services. A number of MiGs were modified for photoreconnaissance, a role for which they could finally utilize the fast high-altitude performance that they had been designed for.

Virtually no MiG-3s survived the war. In 2005, however, a Russian company called Aircraft Restoration Department of Rusavia Ltd recovered the wreckage of five MiG-3s that had crashed in wartime, restored them to flying condition using over 50% of the original parts, and put them up for sale. One of these is now on display in the Military Aviation Museum in Norfolk VA.

NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)

Air-Minded: Close Encounters

pwoodford for Aviation & Pilots

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 29, 2020 · 12:36 PM PDT

2020/04/29 · 12:36

The US Department of Defense recently declassified cockpit videos showing US Navy F/A-18 aircrews trying to intercept and identify "unexplained aerial phenomena" ... UFOs, in short. The videos have been circulating freely on YouTube and social media for a few years, but the fact that DoD has now released them has some thinking this is the military's way of acknowledging we're not alone in the universe.

YouTube Video

When I was actively flying F-15s for the US Air Force, friends, relatives, and random civilians would regularly ask me about UFO encounters. I hated to disappoint them, but the truth is I never saw any. Yesterday, though, some friends on Facebook were discussing the just-released videos and I remembered the night I scrambled on one.

It happened in the early 1980s when I flew with the 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron in the Netherlands. My wingman and I were on Zulu alert, charged with defending the airspace over the 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force region, a lateral band extending eastward from Belgium and the Netherlands across northern Germany to the East German border. The klaxon went off shortly after one in the morning and we launched into pitch blackness. NAto controllers vectored us east, telling us we were to intercept, identify, and escort an unidentified target. As we crossed into German airspace, the target disappeared from NATO radar screens. They kept us on an eastward heading until we arrived at the point where the target had been, somewhere close to the border with East Germany. We orbited for a spell, scanning the empty night sky with our own radars and eyeballs, but there was nothing there ... as far as we could tell we were the only two aircraft in the sky. Once we'd burned off half our fuel we headed back to Soesterberg.

A few hours later we heard that our vanishing target had been officially classified as a UFO. As best we could find out, ground observers the night before reported seeing something in the air that didn't behave like a normal aircraft. Air defense radar sites in West Germany picked up a blip in the same area, and shortly afterward NATO scrambled us.

That's the closest I ever came to an actual UFO. By “UFO” I don't mean flying saucer, just “unidentified flying object.” Could have been a Cessna 150. Could have been an East German MiG that briefly strayed into allied airspace. Could have been a weather balloon, ball lightning, or swamp gas. Sure, it could have been space aliens, but I doubt it.

I don't know what the objects on those US Navy F/A-18 HUD tapes are, or what the tapes prove. I never saw anything like that in 24 years of flying fighters.

So here I am, continuing to disappoint UFO believers all these years later.

Another thing people often asked me about was Area 51. I flew near Area 51 many times and never saw anything weird. Any aircrew member who's participated in USAF Red Flag exercises knows exactly where Area 51 is, smack in the middle of the Nevada Test and Training Range. No one is allowed to fly inside its boundaries, which are clearly marked on the aerial charts we all carried on Red Flag missions, but we'd routinely fly close enough to to see the Groom Lake airfield, where the USAF tests classified weapon systems. I have no reason to believe Area 51 is anything more than a remote and secure location for testing classified equipment and weapons.

Nevada_TTR_Chart — Nevada Test & Training Range (Area 51 is the "box" near the center of the complex)

I was a range operations manager during the mid-1990s, stationed at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas. I'd frequently drive uprange with my guys to various sites in the NTTR, supporting the same Red Flag exercises we used to fly in.

We usually drove up on US Highway 95, paralleling the western edge of the NTTR and entering the range complex through a guarded gate near Tonapah, Nevada. Rather than take the same route home, we'd leave by another guarded gate on the northeast side and take Nevada 375, "the Extraterrestrial Highway," through the little town of Rachel on our way down to US Highway 93 and back to Vegas.

Rachel is the closest civilian settlement to Area 51, home of the Little A'Le'Inn, where we'd always stop to grab a burger and visit the gift store. We wore flight suits uprange, and before stopping in Rachel would take off our patches and name tags. UFO tourists, Area 51 "investigators," and other true believers come to Rachel from all over, and since it's the only place in town they congregate at the Little A'Le'Inn. We'd come through the door in our green flight suits, Ray-Bans, and short military haircuts and a hush would fall over the place. We could feel multiple sets of eyeballs on us the entire time we were there. Occasionally one of our observers would give us a conspiratorial wink, as if to say "Yeah, we know what you guys fly!"

Those visits to the Little A'Le'Inn were the high point of my Nellis assignment, and if they made some true believers' days, well then we're even. Had they the nerve to ask, though (they never did), I'd have had to tell them I'd never seen a UFO, far less flew one.

Icons of Aviation History: The Lancaster

Lenny Flank for Kossack Air Force

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Thursday April 23, 2020 · 12:37 PM PDT

2020/04/23 · 12:37

The Lancaster was the frontline heavy bomber of the RAF during World War Two, and dropped, in total, more tons of bombs than the American B-17.

“Icons of Aviation History” is a diary series that explores significant and historic aircraft.

Avro_Lancaster_298 — Lancaster bomber over England photo from Wikicommons

By the late 1930s, England knew that a war with Hitler’s Germany was looming. She also knew that the Royal Air Force was not prepared for it: the new and more modern Nazi bombers and fighters outclassed everything the British could put up against them. And so the RAF made desperate attempts to catch up.

In 1936, the UK requested proposals for a new two-engined medium bomber that could deliver 4 tons of bombs to a radius of 1,000 miles. At the Avro company, designer Roy Chadwick took up the challenge, and within a few months had drawn up plans for the Manchester. By mid-1937, the British Air Ministry ordered 200 of the bombers, to be fitted with the still-in-development Rolls-Royce Vulture engines, before a prototype had even been built.

But when the Manchester began entering service in November 1940, it proved to be a disappointment. The Vulture engine was simply not powerful enough, and the Manchester struggled to keep up speed or to gain altitude. The engine was also mechanically unreliable. Once the initial order of 200 had been delivered, the RAF stopped procuring the planes. Other two-engined bombers were rushed into production—the Whitley, the Wellington, the Blenheim—but they were also inadequate. What was needed was a heavy four-engine bomber that could take the fight into Germany.

At Avro, Chadwick recognized that the Manchester’s problems came not from his airframe, but from the inadequate Vulture engines. So he redesigned the aircraft, turning it into a heavy bomber with four less-powerful but more reliable Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, mounted onto bigger wings. The Merlin had already been put into service with the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, had been proven to be dependable, and was already being produced in large numbers. Many would dub it the best aircraft engine of the war.

And so, with more fuel tanks added to increase the range, the Manchester airframe became transformed into the Lancaster heavy bomber. The first prototype flew in January 1941, and a second test model appeared in May, using the most powerful Merlin XX engine available. The second prototype also altered the original triple-tailfin design to a twin tailfin, to allow for a better field of fire for the turret guns. The Air Ministry immediately began placing orders—1,000 planes in October, and more to follow. Avro couldn’t keep up, and licensed Lancaster Model B Is were soon being produced by other British companies. At one point there was a shortage of Merlin engines: to keep up continuous production of both fighters and bombers, a new Lancaster B II model was introduced as a stopgap, using the Bristol Hercules engine instead. Only 300 of these were made. Another version was produced by the Victory Aircraft Company in Canada, using American-built Merlin engines from the Packard automobile manufacturer, and the British began producing Model B III “Lancs” which also used American-built Merlin engines.

The Lanc had a crew of seven. The pilot flew the plane, and the flight engineer sitting next to him monitored the mechanical systems and controlled the fuel tanks (he was not a co-pilot—he had no flight controls). Behind them, the navigator kept the plane on course, and further back was the wireless radio operator who maintained communications. In the nose, the bomb-aimer took control of the aircraft once over the target and dropped the bombs; he also manned the forward-facing machine guns. And there were two additional gunners, one in the upper turret and one in the tail turret (with four guns), to defend against enemy fighters. In all, the Lancaster had 8 .303-caliber machine guns. Early designs had a gun turret in the belly, but this was later removed.

Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, who had been appointed in early 1942 to head the RAF’s Bomber Command, immediately recognized the potential of the big bomber. The Lancaster could deliver a huge bomb load, and it could do it over long distances. After the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, it would become the weapon that England would use to carry the war into Germany’s heartland. “Bomber” Harris began to plan a relentless air campaign that would, he hoped, bring the Nazis to their knees.

A controversy quickly broke out with the Americans, however, on the best tactics to use. The Americans wanted to wage a bombing campaign that would specifically target key areas of German industry and hit them with “precision strikes”. That would require bombing from relatively low altitudes during day, since even the best bombsights of the time were barely able to give any accuracy. The RAF, however, had already tried precision daylight raids early in the war, and had suffered heavy losses from Luftwaffe fighters. So Harris argued that the Allies should launch “area strikes” that would saturate entire German cities with bombs, which would fly at night and at high altitude to escape the Nazi defenses. In the end, there was no agreement, and each side began to plan and carry out the type of raids that it wanted to do. The B-17s and B-24s went in during the day, and the Lancasters and Halifaxes went in at night. Germany would be bombed round the clock.

Although it had over 50,000 separate parts, the Lancaster had been designed to be constructed in five sections which could then be fitted together, making it easier to mass-produce. British factories were soon churning them out at the rate of five a day. But losses were heavy too: by the end of the war, over half of the 7,377 Lancasters that had been built were lost to enemy fire or to accidents. The average lifetime of a bomber crew was seven and a half missions.

Bomber Harris’s night-bombing campaign went into action in 1943. A series of electronic navigation systems were introduced and continuously improved to help the bombers reach their targets. Particular airplanes were fitted with radar sets and radio direction finders and their crews trained as “Pathfinders”. Their job was to go in first and drop their bombs as accurately as they could: the rest of the bombers behind them would then drop their own loads onto that marked aiming point. One by one, German industrial cities were targeted and destroyed.

Other crews were trained for their own special missions. The Lancaster could carry the biggest payload of any Allied bomber, an advantage that was often useful. The 11-ton “Grand Slam” bomb was designed to take out hardened targets like submarine pens, while specially-built “skip bombs” were used to destroy the hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr Valley. In all, Lancasters flew 156,000 wartime sorties and delivered 608,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and 51 million incendiary bomblets.

After the war ended, the Lanc continued as a long-range anti-submarine patrol and as a photo reconnaissance platform. The airframe was also modified into the Lancastrian, a civilian trans-Atlantic passenger plane. In March 1946, a Lancastrian became the first aircraft to fly out of London’s new Heathrow Airport.

Today, there are about 17 surviving Lancaster bombers. Most are on display in the UK, with several in Canada, including “Bazalgette” at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta, and a post-war version on exhibit at the National Air Force Museum of Canada in Trenton, Ontario.

NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)

I have not felt this way since WW2.... (UPDATED x 2)

Otteray Scribe

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday April 18, 2020 · 4:15 PM PDT

2020/04/18 · 16:15

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.. — Pearl Harbor, 8:00 AM, December 7, 1941

Sitting on the couch watching Rachel Maddow post chart after chart about the progression of the Covid-19 virus, the memory hole sent me spiraling. It was not a good feeling at all.

In a flash of Déjà vu, events of long ago winters came rushing back. Not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one. An experiential punch to the gut.

How I got to this place and time is a long story….

I was born during the Great Depression, but remember little of it. I do remember the afternoon of December 7, 1941. It was Sunday, and my dad was at work. His work was next to our house and I often dropped in. Everyone was gathered around the polished walnut cabinet of the huge Stromberg-Carlson radio console. I sat on the floor in front of the big radio. The breathless announcer kept repeating, “They stabbed our boys in the back!”

We were at war. A few weeks before, on October 1, 1941, a German submarine had sunk the American destroyer Reuben James. They got away with that cold blooded murder by attributing it to an “accident and mistaken identity.”

There was no way to ignore the Pearl Harbor attack. America was at War.

The war had a head start in Europe and Asia as the Japanese and Germans expanded their empires. We had managed to stay out of it so far, but isolationism ended with a gigantic crash that Sunday in December.

In the ensuing days, the news was non-stop. Patriotic songs were written and sung. There were long lines at the Army and Navy recruitment offices.

President Franklin Roosevelt talked to the nation in what he called Fireside Chats. They really were that. He had a soothing way of speaking; gentle, but still firm and fatherly. He told the nation what we needed to hear, calling all able-bodied citizens to participate in the war effort, to the extent of our abilities.

I was no exception.

I walked all over town, talking people out of their old pots and pans. Aluminum was prized. Rubber as well. The photo at the right could very well have been me, lugging old tires and inner tubes to the collection place.

We started buying war bond stamps and pasting them into little booklets. It was all a kid could do. There was no school cafeteria, so I could not contribute lunch money. We took our own sandwiches in bags. Our brown paper lunch sacks were folded carefully and brought home each day so they could be reused until they were worn out. Then they were placed in a bigger sack to be taken to a paper collection place once the large bag was full of waste paper.

Those early days of the war, it was not at all clear whether America had a chance to win it. Much of our Navy rested at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The Army Air Corps was a shambles at the time with obsolete and obsolescent planes. Our best fighters were hardly a match for the deadly Japanese Zero and German Messerschmitt fighters. Something had to be done, but we were starting from very near scratch.

Those were dark days. The London Blitz was in every news report. The fall of Poland and France had happened already. Ships were being sunk by the dozens in the North Atlantic. I recall the blackouts and air raid drills. We knew the Germans were working on long range bombers that could reach New York and Washington DC. The Japanese managed to send bomb-carrying balloons which reached the US mainland. We also thought the Japanese had plans to invade the US west coast, just as they had invaded China and the Philippines. That they had designs on New Zealand and Australia was public knowledge.

We would be next.

Not all newsmen could paint a word picture like Edward R. Murrow, but all those news reporters took their lives in their own hands. Not all survived. That is why I have such respect for reporters like Richard Engel.

This short video is audio only. Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from a rooftop in London. This was the kind of newscast we heard every day, and which helped shape who I am today.

YouTube Video

I remember the feeling of despair and helplessness I had as I trudged off to school. I could picture in my minds eye how it might be to live under enemy occupation should our defenses fail.

We had blackout drills, mostly in 1942 and 1943. I helped tack dark cloth over windows at night. We turned all light down low, just one bulb. Much of 1942, we lived in a rented house with no electricity. We conserved energy, so the only light came from a single kerosene lamp. Kerosene was rationed just like gasoline, so conservation was practiced religiously. We did have abundant coal, so that is what fired the cast iron kitchen stove and the pot-bellied stove in the living room. Much of the time our living room was lit only by the amber glow coming from the the little mica window in the door of the stove. When one went outside, the darkness was eerie. There was no light coming from anywhere in our town.

All the while was this terrible dread as we listened to the news broadcasts coming from London and what little news was available from the Pacific. At school, I spent a lot of time examining the world globe in the corner of my classroom. I wanted to know just where the Germans and Japanese were, and how close they were to where we lived.

I watch Rachel Maddow post animated charts showing the spread of the pandemic across the globe.

Like a fungus, an all-too-familiar blood-red expansion grows across the planet. That same feeling of impending doom creeps in and pervades my senses this week. No one born after 1945 can possibly relate to the feeling one gets watching the expanding horror that is growing and growing.

When I watched the current President of the United States appear almost daily with two-hour harangues, insulting reporters present, preening, bragging, saying he alone is #1 who can solve all our problems, while we know all along he is dithering, uncertain, lacking the ability to see beyond TV ratings, trying to figure out how he can turn a profit out of a crisis where Americans are dying by the thousands.

There is no way I can avoid remembering what a REAL President sounds like during such a time. This speech was given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I remember listening to this speech live, as he spoke back on December 9, 1941—these words were burned into my brain back then, and there they remain to this day. I hope anyone who has not listened to any of FDR’s Fireside Chats, takes the time to listen to this archived recording in its entirety.

Listening to these words, spoken so many years ago, may help highlight just how much pain I feel when the current Occupant of the West Wing comes on TV to brag on himself, totally oblivious and lacking any kind of empathy for the suffering of the American people.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States:”

YouTube Video

I remember rationing, when we had to watch even small things. Don’t eat too much breakfast cereal, because wheat for flour is needed for the war effort. Can’t go driving in our Model A car, because gasoline is a precious commodity. Black pepper? Forget it. None available because most spices are imported from countries under occupation.

Can’t buy paint or potting soil? Give me an effing break.

Oh yeah, the latest thing is to create a traffic gridlock around government offices and hospitals so emergency vehicles can’t get through.

I have zero sympathy for that level of density and callousness when the local Emergency Department is full to capacity with people gasping their last breaths, even if they are lucky enough to get a ventilator.

Tell all that to my friend Kirby, who survived Buchenwald. He and one other soldier had one half-rotten potato a day between them. One thin blanket and no shoes for two men who had to sleep on the ground...in late fall.

What have we become? Selfishness has become like a religion to nearly half the population.

No one will be left untouched. No one.

I despair for our country. I grieve with the families who have lost loved ones, because I have walked in their shoes. Actually from the time I was a kid, when gold star flags appeared in the windows of almost every home on our street.

That Gold Star does not represent military rank. It represents one dead soldier.

Just like now, it may have been a son, daughter, brother, father, uncle, or even a best friend.

Just like now, that star represents a failure of humankind. Our failure as a society to get along with one another in peace.

The last thing we need is lack of leadership. Or even worse, purported leaders who spend more time fomenting division and even riots than reassuring our people—all of us—that we will get through this crisis with minimal loss of life.

Wartime president? Not even the faint shadow of a wartime President. I remember what it was like to have a true wartime President. We literally don’t have a President. We have a crude, sexist, racist, foul-mouthed TV host who pretends to be a President.

Or would if he knew how.

So yes, I sit here with the TV on in the background, knowing we have still darker days ahead of us before the sunlight comes. If it does. Do we know what our society and culture will be like a year or two from now? How many reading this will be alive a year from now? This coronavirus is more contagious and deadly than anything I can recall since the Black Death pandemic.

I am not optimistic, but cannot allow myself to give up hope. The only thing that does give me hope is that more than half the population is fed up. The question now is whether there is a sufficient number of fed up people to overcome the probable outside attacks on our voting and electoral system. We know it is coming, so preparation is everything.

In the meantime, the dark cloud of uncertainty hangs over all of us like an impending thunderstorm.

It is important to prevent the despair we feel to result in inaction. Depression tends to cause psychic paralysis. We can’t let that take over our souls, any more than we let WW2 paralyze us. We fought back.

Willow Run B-24 assembly line during WW2. A heavy bomber rolled off the line every 64 minutes.

Angry? Hell yes!

“Remember Pearl Harbor,” spoken through a gritted teeth anger was as much a rallying cry as, “Remember the Alamo,” to previous generations.

Seventy years ago, what did that rallying cry mean? The Pentagon was built in 18 months. Ford Motor Company built a factory at Willow Run, Michigan. That Willow Run factory turned out a four-engine B-24 bomber every 64 minutes.

The Kaiser shipyards in San Francisco built an average of three (!) cargo/troop-carrying Liberty Ships every day. That is three a day once production got up to speed.

I daresay that a ventilator for an Emergency Department or ICU is far less complicated than a 4-engine heavy bomber. Or a 450’ long Liberty Ship freighter.

Not to mention all those 0.35 ounce N-95 safety masks. If we can build a 4-engine heavy bomber weighing 50,000 pounds, or a 14,250 ton freighter in a matter of hours, how come safety masks cannot be turned out quickly in large numbers? You know the answer to that one.

We need our own rallying cry, and we need it now.

We have our own Nero, fiddling while everything is on fire. What shall it be? Let the house burn down, or get busy getting out the fire hoses? In modern parlance, that translates into getting out the vote in record numbers.

Because if you, me, and everyone does not give our full effort to GOTV, we are facing a continuing crumbling of civilized society and culture as we know it.

We not only CAN do better, we MUST do better.

UPDATE:

All the wonderful comments are touching in their eloquence and heartfelt poignancy. I am touched deeply by the comments. I want to hug all of you who responded. As it is, I feel as if we had a big interactive fireside chat ourselves. Not like the chat by a wonderful leader as FDR, but more like swapping personal tales sitting around a campfire.

I love you all and am grateful for the support and encouragement. Heaven knows, we all need encouragement to get the stories out, because they are so personal and painful to relive. Times long ago are relevant for today. It is indeed true that we must remember and learn from history, lest we repeat mistakes of the past.

About to take a break and a nap now. Will be back later.

Evergreen Aviation: Some jet fighters (photo diary)

Ojibwa for Kossack Air Force

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Friday April 17, 2020 · 8:03 AM PDT

2020/04/17 · 08:03

The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, has about 100 aviation and space vehicles on display. Shown below are some jet fighters which are displayed on the Museum grounds.

A Shameless Plug: My Newest Book is Out

Lenny Flank for Kossack Air Force

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday April 16, 2020 · 12:25 PM PDT

2020/04/16 · 12:25

All of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of book series that I am working on for Red and Black Publishers. Several of these series are now available, both in paperback and as Kindle eBooks, at Amazon. The newest is:

Icons of Aviation History 1900-1945: Significant and Historic Aircraft And the Stories Behind Them

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086XL2LSD

(Amazon Kindle and Print)

Stories from some of the most important aircraft in aviation history, from the first flights to the end of the Second World War. Details from their development, achievements, and surviving examples. Seventy-five aircraft, including the Montgolfier Balloons, the Wright Flyer, the Fokker Dr1 triplane, the Sopwith Camel, the Spirit of St Louis, the Ford Tri-Motor, the Douglas DC-3, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, the Supermarine Spitfire, the Mitsubishi Zero, the F4U Corsair, the F6F Hellcat, the Avro Lancaster, the B-29 Superfortress, and many more. Illustrated.

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