Military Archives - Page 10 of 180

When Plumbing Fixtures Ruled the Skies

By the time the first shot was fired in 1914 during the “war to end all wars,” the airplane was barely out of its infancy stage. The early “knights of the air” puttering around in their mostly wooden and fabric-covered flying contraptions were mere observers to the large-scale battles that lay below them. As they […]

On This Day in Aviation History

1938 – First flight of the Bell P-39 Airacobra, a principal American fighter in service at the start of World War II. It is the first fighter in history with a tricycle undercarriage and the first to have the engine installed in the center fuselage, behind the pilot. 1962 – The Royal Canadian Air Force […]

F8 Wings Folded

On January 22, 1968, I was a young LTJG at Miramar, attached to Navy Fighter Squadron VF-53 preparing for a deployment to Vietnam aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard. As a final part of the pre-deployment regimen, all pilots were briefed to fly [ FMLP ] Field Mirror Landing Practice about 2100 that night. This was our last chance […]

Forgotten DC-3 Caught on Camera

Lying on a black sandy beach in the south of Iceland, the wreckage of a crashed U.S. Navy aircraft looks like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. Amazingly, the crew all survived the impact, when the Douglas Super DC-3 was forced to crash land on Sólheimasandur beach on Nov. 24, 1973. But the plane was abandoned rather than recovered, […]

Looking Back: Project FICON

U.S. Navy aircraft carriers are a dominant presence in waters around the world, and interestingly enough, the Air Force once tried to make a flying version. During World War II, bomber aircraft could fly thousands of miles to their targets, unlike gas-guzzling fighters, which had much shorter ranges. This was a big problem for bombers, since they were sitting […]

World War II – The Pioneer Jets

The history of technology is replete with a concept called “multiple independent discovery.” Examples are the incandescent lightbulb by the American inventor Thomas Edison and the British inventor Joseph Swan in 1879, and the computer by Briton Alan Turing and Polish-American Emil Post in 1936. During the 1930s, on opposite sides of the English Channel, […]

Rockoons: A Short Chapter in Atmospheric Research

At first glance, rockets and balloons would appear to be entirely separate technological species that would have little to do with one another. A modern rocket is a highly complex feat of engineering and, if powerful enough, can escape the Earth altogether. A balloon is as simple as simple gets (within reason), but even modern […]

Mitsubishi A6M Zero: Terror of the Pacific

Zero! Normally that’s a number signifying nothing, but to those who know history it indicates an able foe. A dainty, but lethal, dancer that cut a swath across the Pacific so bloody that for the first six months of World War Two it appeared as if nothing could stop it. The stories that filtered back […]

In Theater: Chariots of the Vanquished

By Stan Piet By mid-August 1945, the Japanese Empire was near collapse. Months of sustained bombing and two atomic attacks had devastated its prime cities and a widening blockade was strangling its faltering war industry and starving citizens. But Tokyo’s ingrained militaristic “fight to the death culture” still held sway, and an all out invasion […]

Honoring the ‘Flying Minute Men’

Flying Piper Cubs and Stinson biplanes, aircraft sometimes borrowed for the mission, the Civil Air Patrol guarded the American coast and helped turn back the U-boat onslaught that might otherwise have turned the tide of World War II. Men and women answered the call to serve as the nation went to war, joining the volunteer […]