The Curtiss A-18 Shrike: Another Step on the Curtiss Treadmill to Oblivion In 1934 the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company realized at long last that it had barking up the wrong design tree with its modern looking but very heavy all-metal attack planes. Deciding to make a clean start, it made an offer that Donavan R. ...
Posted in Rare Birds
For almost twenty years after the close of World War I in 1918, the Congress of the United States starved its military services, refusing to appropriate enough money to sustain a tiny Army, a minuscule Air Corps and just barely providing enough for the always-favored Navy. Personnel took the hardest hit, with demotions ...
Posted in Rare Birds
On October 7, 2011, I had the great honor of being inducted into the Commemorative Air Force's American Combat Airman Hall of Fame. The honor was all the greater because of the other inductees, which included Brigadier General Steve Ritchie, the last American pilot ace, and the only man ever to shoot down 5 MiG ...
Posted in Articles
A GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY FOR A WARRIOR WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD April 15, 2012 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortess bomber. Just sixty years before, at Boeing Field, Seattle, the second prototype YB-52, serial number 49-0231, took off for the first time. No one, not its designers nor even its pilots, “Tex” ...
Posted in Articles
In the early 1930s, the name Gee Bee became synonymous with speed as the bullet-shaped racers blazed a winning trail at Cleveland. Yet the beautiful planes, with their gleaming red and white finish, soon acquired the reputation as pilot killers. And so they were—in the 1930s. The Granville Brothers—Zantford, Thomas, Robert, Edward, and Mark—used their wide ...
Posted in Articles
Sometime in the mid of the 1980s, I received a call from a man who had just been selected to be the director of the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. I suspect that he called me because the Hirshhorn is adjacent to the National Air & Space Museum, where I was Director. His question ...
Posted in Articles
This “Aerial Oddity”, the General Aviation G.A. 43, could not be more conventional, but it was designed by one of the greatest, perhaps most eccentric and certainly the most married engineer in aviation history, Virginius Evans Clark. The creative Lieutenant Colonel Clark was a 1907 graduate of the Naval Academy. He learned to fly in 1913 ...
Posted in Rare Birds
If you were his friend, you didn’t call him “Slick”, you called him “Chal”, and you admired him both for his flying career and for his valiant efforts to obtain recognition for the prescient designs of Vincent J. Burnelli. Those designs, so remarkably modern when first introduced, are at last being realized, if not recognized, ...
Posted in Heroes
THE EARLY OVERFLIGHTS: ALONE, UNARMED, UNAFRAID AND UNHERALDED Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and rightly so. No nation, even including Imperial Japan, was as obsessed with secrecy as the U.S.S.R. The Soviet government kept it secrets closely guarded, going to sometimes grotesque lengths of disinformation. ...
Posted in Articles
On January 17, 1991, the world watched in wonder as its television sets showed stealth fighters, air-launched cruise missiles and precision guided munitions gut the Iraqi air defense system during the opening hours of Desert Storm. None knew then, and few know now, that the path for these high tech wonders was prepared by the ...
Posted in Heroes
Defense Media Network