By Dr. Carlo Kopp, Associate Fellow AIAA, Senior Member IEEE, PEng Unprecedented cost blowouts, schedule delays, and serious questions about performance and capabilities in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program have produced some very intensive public argument in recent times about the merits of stealth and other advanced fighter technologies. While most of the problems [...]
Flight Petty Officer Saburo Sakai was having a good day. His squadron of A6M2 Zeros of the Tainan Wing had departed Rabaul, New Britain, more than 500 miles northwest of the previously obscure island of Guadalcanal, responding to an American amphibious landing. In a series of combats north of the island, Sakai had shot down [...]
The date on Wylam’s art for the P-47D Thunder-bolt is December 1944. At the time, Air Age Publish-ing was 15 years old. Model Airplane News was a relative upstart and Wylam was producing his fantastic art for us. That makes FJ’s sister magazine and our parent company 83 years old—one of the oldest family-owned publishing [...]
Learning to dance with a high-spirited lady By James H. Farmer By 1959, Major Ernest Craigwell, Tuskegee Airman and a current Air Defense Command fighter pilot, had already enjoyed his fair share of time flying hot jets and a certain modest measure of notoriety. Two years earlier, his role flying F-51s alongside Korean War legend [...]
Life magazine, with the help of the USN, commissioned the construction of an incredible series of gigantic dioramas that illustrated the various events and phases of the Battle of Midway. While preparing Barrett Tillman’s exhaustive article on that operation in this issue, our own Stan Piet stumbled upon what appears to be the entire file [...]
Ten years ago in Flight Journal In the April 2002 issue of Flight Journal, the multi-faceted Walt Boyne, known to the world as a familiar face on many TV aviation documentaries as the former Director of the National Air and Space Museum, and as the author of dozens of nationally recognized books and novels, steps [...]
B-17 crewmen remember the German missions By Mark Carlson Ex communi periculo fraternitas ‘From common peril, brotherhood’ board each of the thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses that left the soil of England bound for targets in Europe were 10 young men. Outwardly, they were no different from any late-teen or early-twenties boy you’d meet anywhere [...]
In September 1939, while Europe was erupting for the second time in two generations, America slowly prepared for war. That month, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama applied to the Civil Aeronautics Administration to participate in the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPT). Thereby, black males tentatively became eligible for government flight training—a revolutionary development in American [...]
