By any measure, fifty years is remarkable. Birthdays, reunions, wedding anniversaries – in all of these the marker set at fifty years is justifiably prominent and noteworthy. For aircraft — especially those in carrier aviation, it is signatory. This month the E-2 Hawkeye will celebrate 50 years, starting with the first flight of the prototype,…
Breathes there a soul so dead that these words don’t send a chill through the spine? When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to…
25 June 1950: The U.S. Government asked for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to consider the invasion of the Republic of South Korea launched by North Korean forces early in the morning of the 25th (Korean time). The Council, meeting later the same day, adopted a resolution calling for the cessation of…
In every battle there is a moment when the combatants, and the world, seem to catch their breath. It is a fleeting moment, lost in the blink of an eye. But in that same blink, everything changes. Such moments are borne of desperation, of courage, of plain dumb luck. But they are pivotal – for…
Many of us do not know how we will react when suddenly called upon to perform the extraordinary in desperate and lethal conditions. We train and plan, but until the bullet flies or the fire burns close at hand, all we can do is speculate. On the morning of December 7th, 1941 there was no…
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we…
…Well, Mitchells more precisely… Forty B-25’s gather in celebration of the 6th Anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. (h/t Rich R.)
That whole warm, feel good evolution that was the 65th anniversary celebration of the defeat of Germany? The one where US and British troops participated in the parade for the first time, ever? Turns out someone still has an axe or two to grind: Vladimir Putin has snubbed both the Prince of Wales and the…
Sixty-five years ago. . . . . . Guts, determination, innovation & courage were defined (and well before Joint was “cool”) (Courtesy Mary R. over at USNI’s blog — General Doolittle describes the Tokyo raid) Conceived in the dark aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the raid had its genesis in the idea of…
A few days back I received a very nice note regarding an earlier Flightdeck Friday whose subject, the A5A Vigilante, is a favorite of mine.  Now, having been frustrated upon checking into VT-10 (ahem, many years ago) to learn that I’d missed the last class allowed to go Vigi’s, any story about Vigi’s will make…
