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AMERICAN BEAUTY : DECEMBER 2023

P-40 KIWI WARRIOR : OCTOBER 2023

The Legend of Maj. Paul "Pappy" Gunn

Their Finest Hour

Butcher Bird Hellcat & Corsair: A test pilot recalls

Stinson’s Big-Guy L-Bird

Stalin’s Flying Hammer

LATEST

Peter Teichman pulls in close to the cameraship
in his Mustang, painted as “Jumpin’ Jacques.” Teichman’s Mustang, his first acquisition for the
North Weald, England-based Hangar 11 Collection,
is unique as it is one of only a few Mustangs with
combat history. It still carries the field repairs from battle scars she received while flying with the 332nd Fighter Group. (Photo by John Dibbs/facebook.com/theplanepicture)

South Pacific Warrior: A rare combat Mustang

“We’d fly over the target, level, and the target would go under the wing. We’d be slowing down, and slowing down, pull up, and just do a wing over. Slightly beyond the target, pull over, and then come straight down. We had a gun sight, but [we’d] just line the target up on the seam […]

Night Hunter — the first Corsair equipped with radar

Hunched in the cockpit of an F4U-2 Corsair in the darkest, blackest night he could remember, Second Lieutenant Frank Lang peered at the 6-inch scope in the center of his instrument panel and saw nothing significant to break up the green-yellow line inscribing a circle around the dial.

Kittyhawk Jungle Rescue

Confined in a microworld of levers, switches, and instruments, Royal Australian Air Force Flight Sergeant James Denman Harvey slid his Curtiss P-40’s eight-piece canopy backwards and looked down. Hammered by tropical heat and skin slippery in perspiration, he studied the surface of a newly captured airstrip called “Tadji.” Harvey and fellow No. 78 Squadron pilots […]

The Rarest of Tigers

By the end of WW II, more than 8,000 D.H.82s had been built. Large numbers were disposed of as war surplus and were available on the civil market for as little as £50. A number were the subject of conversion schemes. The most ambitious was that carried out by Jackaroo Aircraft, Thruxton, Hampshire, England in […]

SAAB 37 Viggen – The Bird of Many Feathers

Sweden is an aeronautically unique country. After WW II, the military realized that it needed better equipment to protect the nation, so beginning in 1946, the Air Force became one of the world’s largest operators of the most state-of-the-art fighter available, the P-51 Mustang. However, while doting over what were probably the most pristine Mustangs […]

DeHavilland DH84 Dragon

Many British and Commonwealth air routes were established by airlines using de Havilland’s 6-passenger seat, twin-engine biplane, the DH84 Dragon. The Dragon’s first flight (November 1932) pre-dated the better-known DH89 Dragon Rapide (or Dominie in military service) by two years, although both aircraft made their maiden flights at the DH airfield of Stag Lane in […]

Me 163 Komet: A Brilliant Failure

The Komet was not a war’s-end-crazy-idea born of desperation, as is often believed. In fact, the design began in the late 1930s, and the prototype flew in 1941. It was the hands-down winner for the crown of fastest operational aircraft of World War II, both in speed and climb. From the technological view, it included […]

America’s Few: Marine Aces of the South Pacific

Written by aviation historian Bill Yenne, “America’s Few” is a new book from Osprey Publishing that delves into the history of U.S. Marine Corps aviation in World War II, following the feats of the Corps’ top-scoring aces in the skies over Guadalcanal. Marine Corps aviation began in 1915, functioning as a self-contained expeditionary force. During […]

Bad Kitty! VF-19 “Satan’s Kittens”

VF-19 “Satan’s Kittens” Chew Up the Enemy “I had well over 1,000 hours of time in the air before I entered combat. Most of that was as an instrument instructor flying the SNJ. Instrument flying really teaches you the finer points of flying an airplane. It also makes you focus and for some reason I […]

“Test Pilot: An Extraordinary Career Testing Civil Aircraft”

Having flown an astonishing 400 different aircraft, as a licensed Category 1 test pilot and flight test instructor for both airplanes and helicopters, Chris Taylor is arguably one of the best qualified and widely experienced test pilots working today anywhere in the world. After obtaining his private pilot’s license at the age of just 17, […]

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