It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas…
1050L 24 Oct 1944. USS St. LO (CVE 63) is under heavy air attack. After successfully fending off the superior surface force of VADM Takeo Kurita’s Center Force, “Taffy 3″ is now defending against a surprise air attack that has lasted some 40 minutes already. One of the features of this attack is the use…
17 December 1956. The icy fog of the mid-December morning had long dissipated when an odd appearing aircraft took the active duty runway. Twin-engines and a shoulder mounted wing marked its lineage to with that of the S-2 family, but a set of twn tails and more importantly, a huge, airfoil-shaped radome that stretched back…
“Racing,” as the saying goes, “improves the breed.” And during the Roaring 20’s, the rage of the nation (and the world at large) was airplane racing. While the sport would reach its ultimate form in the 1930’s with the likes of the Thompson Trophy races, one of the earliest trophy races was the Schneider Trophy,…
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,…
Certain pairings, on the surface, seem to be made for each other – Bogie & Bacall, rum & Coke ®, etc. But balsa wood and afterburners? Almost seems counter-intuitive. This weeks feature is the Vought F6U Pirate, the Navy’s first composite-built and afterburner fighter. By 1944 it was apparent from the reports being returned from…
OK, so it’s back onto the (Air)bus with the rest of the sardines and head back to Occupied Territory after a week of TDY near the Rockies’ Front Range. Presently researching a (near) future post that includes the events surrounding an engagement between 22 P-38J’s of the 474th Fighter Group temporarily based at St Marceau, France…
