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Mustangs At Heart

It’s no secret that the P-51 Mustang and the Ford Mustang share a special bond; after all, the car was named after the airplane. The P-51 was arguably the most successful fighter aircraft of the Second World War, dominating in the European theater and making a large end of the war contribution in the Pacific. […]

Lee Lauderback Sets a Record

“I think the thing I like most about my time with the Mustang has been the people I’ve met through it.” The speaker is Lee Lauderback, founder/owner of Stallion 51, the longtime Mustang check-out haven in Kissimmee, Florida. He recently had a good week in which he logged his 10,000th hour in the P-51D and […]

Warbirds – A Personal History

My own interest in warbirds goes back to the BT-13 my father bought and parked in front of his store to draw in customers; that was when I was six years old. Other kids had jungle gyms to climb on—I had a BT-13, and surplus airplanes were everywhere. On our semimonthly trip to visit my […]

MiG-15: Crude but Effective

The Yalu river runs wide and dark across the huge peninsula that is Korea. On either side, the topography is the same and at 40,000 feet, the hard blue sky doesn’t change color just because the politics below are different. One morning in 1950, however, when American and ROK (Republic of Korea) pilots came back […]

Messerschmitt Bf 109E “Emil”

Apart from its combat record, the Bf 109 remains a historic aircraft for sheer numbers produced. More than seven decades after WWII, only the Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik exceeds the Messerschmitt’s total of 34,000 produced, even under the pressure of continual Allied bombing. Nothing else comes close. Frequently, the Soviet Yakovlev fighter series is compared to […]

D-Day Fighter Pilot Accounts: Little Friends over the Beach

They must have been a sight for sore eyes to the soldiers on the beach as wave after wave of fighters, bombers, and paratrooper-stuffed transports, some towing gliders, passed overhead, all of them adorned with black and white painted stripes. The invasion was on, and many of the fighter pilots expecting a Luftwaffe slugfest were […]

F-82B Twin Mustang – Free Wallpaper

Each time we produce an issue of Flight Journal, we go through literally hundreds and hundreds of photos, but only about one out of 20 ends up gracing one of the pages. The net result is that we have an awful lot of photos that didn’t quite fit the layout, but they are great […]

Free: Original Drawing of Sikorsky “Le Grand”

When 23-year-old Igor Sikorsky proposed building the world’s biggest airplane and the first four-engine airplane, he was laughed at. However, in 1913, he proved his detractors all wrong, and had taken his first step toward becoming an aviation icon. The drawing we are offering is directly from the Sikorsky Archives and was initialed by Igor […]

Screen Saver: 532nd BG B-17 formation

Traditionally, we’ve offered some of the fantastic line drawings of William Wylam, Willis Nye or some of the other classic draftsmen/artists in FlightJournal.com. This time around, however, the Air Age Archive didn’t have any drawings that directly tie to this issue. So, we’re going in another direction and offer a high-quality vintage photograph, in this […]

Museums’ Me 262 Gets its Colors

Thursday, May 10, 2019. The Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum (FHCAM) unveiled the paint scheme of its highly anticipated Me 262 project. The Me 262 was acquired by the museum back in 2000 and its restoration has been kept very quiet until now! FHCAM is excited to unveil, to you for the first time, […]