Aviation History Spring 2023

A watch that revolutionized timekeeping at a price equally as radical.

In the history of timepieces, few moments are more important than the creation of the world’s first Piezo timepiece. First released to the public in 1969, the watch turned the entire industry on its head, ushering in a new era of timekeeping. It’s this legacy that we’re honoring with the Timemaster Watch, available only through Stauer at a price only we can offer.

Prior to Piezo watches, gravity-driven Swiss watches were the standard bearer of precision timekeeping. But all that changed when the first commercially available Piezo watch came onto the market.

The result of ten years of research and development by some of the world’s top engineers, they discovered that when you squeeze a certain type of crystal, it generates a tiny electric current. And, if you pass electricity through the crystal, it vibrates at a precise frequency–exactly 32,768 times each second. When it came on the market, the Piezo watch was the most dependable timepiece available, accurate to 0.2 seconds per day. Today, it’s still considered a spectacular advance in electrical engineering.

“[Piezo timepieces]...it would shake the Swiss watch industry to its very foundations.”

Foundation For Economic Education

With the Timemaster we’ve set one of the world’s most important mechanical advances inside a decidedly masculine case. A handsome prodigy in rich leather and gold-finished stainless steel. The simplicity of the watch’s case belies an ornately detailed dial, which reflects the prestige of this timepiece.

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SECOND

36 AN AIRPLANE FOR THE YANKS

44 THE DAY WILEY POST KILLED WILL ROGERS (AND HIMSELF)

This Historic World War II Coin, Note and Stamp Collection Can Be Yours!

is is an extensive 23-Pc. Collection of superb World War II memorabilia, spanning the United States, the Paci c and Europe. Each piece was issued by or for their respective nation during the World War II era, and this is the rst time ever that we’ve seen them assembled in one great set. is collection includes: U.S. and Foreign Coins—including U.S. “emergency” coins struck in uncommon metals to help with the war e ort, including a silver U.S. War Nickel, a steel 1943 Cent, and a Cent struck from copper recycled from shell cases—along with German “propaganda” coins featuring the Nazi swastika, and an Italian Lira displaying symbols of its own fascist regime; plus coins from Canada and Great Britain, two of our closest allies.

Japanese Invasion Notes—including Japanese guerilla and invasion notes printed for the Philippines and Burma which were controlled by Japan during the war, all in uncirculated condition.

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U.S. 1943

Germany 1939-45 Reichspfennig

Great Britain 1939-45 Half Penny

Canada 1944-45 “V” Five Cents

Italy 1939-43 Lira

Historic Japanese Guerilla and Invasion Notes

Philippines 1943 1 Peso Japanese Invasion Note

Philippines 1943 5 Peso Japanese Invasion Note

Philippines 1942-44 25 Centavos Guerilla Note

Burma 1942 1 Rupee Japanese Invasion Note

Burma 1942 5 Rupees Japanese Invasion Note

Burma 1942-44 10 Rupees Japanese Invasion Note

Burma 1944 100 Rupees Japanese Invasion Note

Patriotic and Significant U.S. and Foreign Stamps

U.S. 1940 2¢ National Defense Stamp

U.S. 1943 2¢ Allied Nations Stamp

U.S. 1942 3¢ Win the War Stamp

U.S. 1946 3¢ WW II Veterans Stamp

U.S. 1946 3¢ Iwo Jima Stamp

Germany 1941-44 12 Pfenning Hitler Head Stamp Germany 1941-44 25 Pfenning Hitler Head Stamp Philippines 1942-44 2 Centavos Japanese Occupation Stamp Philippines 1942-44 5 Centavos Japanese Occupation Stamp

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Thunderbolts for Brazil

SPRING 2023 / VOL. 33, NO. 2

TOM HUNTINGTON EDITOR

LARRY PORGES SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR

STEPHAN WILKINSON CONTRIBUTING EDITOR ARTHUR H. SANFELICI EDITOR EMERITUS

BRIAN WALKER GROUP DESIGN DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY GUY ACETO PHOTO EDITOR

DANA B. SHOAF EDITOR IN CHIEF CLAIRE BARRETT NEWS AND SOCIAL EDITOR

CORPORATE KELLY FACER SVP REVENUE OPERATIONS MATT GROSS VP DIGITAL INITIATIVES ROB WILKINS DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP MARKETING JAMIE ELLIOTT SENIOR DIRECTOR, PRODUCTION MEL GRAY PRINT PRODUCTION COORDINATOR ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP ADVERTISING SALES MGreenberg@mco.com TERRY JENKINS REGIONAL SALES MANAGER TJenkins@historynet.com

41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001

GRAVE MATTERS

MAILBAG

The article on the aerial adventures of Merian Cooper in the Autumn 2022 issue was very interesting. A few years ago, I visited Lwow (now Lviv), Ukraine, and went to the Lychakiv Cemetery, which includes the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwow. I was surprised to discover the memorial to the American pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron, with the graves of T.V. McCallum, Arthur Kelly and Edmund Graves. It appears that the entire military cemetery fell into a degree of disrepair under Soviet rule, but since Ukraine gained its independence, the Polish military cemetery was restored in 2005.

THE WRONG STUFF

In his editorial in the Winter 2023 issue, Tom Huntington stated that Orville Wright “never piloted an airplane again after he nearly died in a crash in 1908.” That is not correct. Just one year later, Orville did all the flying to complete the test trials for the Army contract for the first U.S. military airplane. The next year, Orville’s many flights included taking his brother Wilbur up for their only flight together. In 1911 he returned to Kitty Hawk where he set soaring records that lasted many years, and in 1913 he piloted pioneering seaplane flights.

FOUR TOO FEW

I always love your magazine, but to quibble: the Saunders-Roe Princess [“Flight Test,” Winter 2023] had 10 turbines, not six. The four inboard nacelles had two turbines each, driving contra-rotating props. The outboards had single turbines driving single props. The Princess was the victim of early innovation—the use of efficient/reliable/lightweight turbines on an anachronistic hull. There were plenty of adequate airports after the war, so water landings were no longer necessary.

Joe Deck, Buffalo, New York

LOSE SOME WEIGHT

Having worked for many years on the Space Shuttle program, I enjoyed the article by Douglas G. Adler about the Shuttle Training Aircraft [“Sticking the Landing,” Autumn 2022]. There is a significant error in the quoted weight of the orbiter, however. As bad as the glide ratio was for the orbiter, it would have been much worse at 4 million pounds. In reality, the heaviest landing ever, STS-83, was 235,421 pounds. The Space Transportation System liftoff weight was about 4.5 million pounds.

STUCK

In “Sticking the Landing,” the photo reminded me of my times flying as copilot on Northwest Airlines’ DC-7Cs, because with that aircraft the pilot could lower the main landing gear but not the nose gear when needing to get the plane down faster, and then lower the nose gear when appropriate. The article “The Ten Worst Fighters of World War II” in that issue gave me everything I’ve ever wanted to

know about the CW-21 Demon, which is a beautiful design. Thanks for a fine magazine.

Paul A. Ludwig, Seattle, Washington

CORRECTIONS

In the Winter 2023 “Milestones” entry, you wrote that “the action on the invasion’s first day marked the first time in history that Americanbuilt airplanes squared off against each other in war.” I’m afraid this is not correct. There were several previous instances in which this unfortu

prior to the Allied invasion of North Africa was during the so-called “Leticia Affair” involving Peru and Colombia in 1932, in which Curtiss, Douglas and Vought aircraft engaged each other rather significantly. I detail this in my book The Forgotten American Volunteer Group Then, on page 43 of Steve Wartenberg’s otherwise excellent account of the adventures of Cal Rodgers, the photo is not of the plane Robert Fowler used to make the first aerial crossing of the Isthmus of Panama but actually shows Major Walter W. Wynne of the 7th Aero Squadron after he made the first airmail flight from the Atlantic to the Pacific side of the Canal in 1919. He was the squadron commander at the time, having been preceded by a young Henry H. “Hap” Arnold.

Dan Hagedorn, Fairfax, Virginia

We know better than to contradict Mr. Hagedorn, Curator Emeritus of the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. We do regret the errors and include here the photo of Fowler’s airplane that we should have used.

SEND LETTERS TO: aviationhistory@historynet.com (Letters may be edited for publication)

HOMEBUILT SPITFIRE CLEARED FOR FLIGHT

wanted a Spitfire ever since I was eight years old and I saw Reach for the Sky,” said Steve Markham of Odiham, Hampshire. That was a common inspiration among English boys who saw the 1956 film about the Royal Air Force’s legless Spitfire ace, Douglas Bader. Few, however, made the fantasy come true.

BRIEFING

In 2006 the retired engineer and his wife Kay—also a licensed pilot— bought a kit for an 80-percent-scale “Mark 26” Supermarine Spitfire airframe plus engine parts, propellers and other components, and began assembling a replica of an unarmed photoreconnaissance version. They based their airplane on one with the registration number PL793, which had operated from Hampshire. “If you want to buy a World War II original Spitfire, it now costs between two and four million pounds,” Markham

It

explained. This is a much less expensive way of doing it.”

After 11,250 hours of work, Markham completed the Spitfire in 2017, but it needed evaluation for a full flight permit from Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority. It was finally cleared for flight in October. Markham could then fulfill another longstanding dream—flying to the Isle of Wight for ice cream. Future destinations include Scotland and Rome. “It feels fantastic, it’s gorgeous,” Markham said, echoing the feelings of just about everyone who ever piloted a Spitfire. “It’s something special.” —Jon Guttman

AIR QUOTE

—WILL

MAY 22, 1927

“Of all things that Lindbergh’s great feat demonstrated, the greatest was to show us that a person could still get the entire front page without murdering anybody.”

ROGERS,

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress first flew in 1952, more than 70 years ago. Since then, it has provided the backbone for the U.S. Air Force’s bomber fleet and is expected to continue its prominent role until around 2050—when the venerable aircraft will be pushing 100.

It cannot do that without upgrading, though, and in October the Air Force unveiled an artist’s conception (above) of what the B-52 of the future will look like. The B-52K or J will be powered by eight Rolls-Royce

NOT YOUR FATHER’S B-52

SPITFIRE RETURNS TO PRODUCTION IN THE U.K.

n other Spitfire news, the English model company Airfix has released its new Spitfire Mk.IXc model, a top-of-the-line 1/24th scale kit. The model company will manufacture them on “home soil” at a factory in Sussex, in southeast England. “For various business rationale, Airfix models have been manufactured overseas, predominately in China, India and France since the mid-90s,” said Airfix’s Dale Luckhurst. “However, when we decided to produce this new Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IXc, it just felt right to move the production of such a British icon back to the UK.” This marks the first time “Spitfires” have been manufactured in England since 1948.

Airfix released its first model airplane in 1955, and it was a basic 1/72 scale version of the Spitfire. The new kit will build into a bigger airplane, more than 15 inches long and with a wingspan of 18.5 inches.

Follow Aviation History on Historynet.com and Facebook for an exclusive review of the kit online and follow along with our “Modeling Minute” on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. —Guy Aceto

F-130 engines instead of the Pratt & Whitney TF-33 engines that Stratofortresses have been using since 1962. The airplane will also sport an updated cockpit, new radar systems and various other additions for the twenty-first century. The Air Force expects the new, improved B-52s to enter service in 2028.

AIR FORCE MUSEUM DEBUTS SKYRAIDER

In November, the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, unveiled its latest acquisition, a Douglas A-1H Skyraider for the museum’s Southeast Asia War Gallery. The airplane flew for South Vietnam from 1965 to 1975, but during 18 months of work it was restored to look like the Proud American, a Skyraider flown over Vietnam by Air Force Capt. Ron Smith. The propeller-driven Skyraiders often flew search-and-rescue missions, where their firepower and range let them secure territory until rescue helicopters arrived. Smith received the Air Force Cross for once such mission he flew in the Proud American to rescue an American shot down over North Vietnam. Lt. Col. William A. Jones III received the Medal of Honor for a rescue mission he flew in the same airplane in 1968. The original Proud American was shot down in September 1972, the last Skyraider lost during the Vietnam War.

CAREER CHANGE

CAT HOUSE

The Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star is a trainer version of the P-80— the U.S. Air Force’s first operational jet. Given a stretched fuselage to accommodate a second seat, the T-33 first flew in 1948; Bolivia was still using it as late as 2017. During the T-33’s long career, more than 40 nations used it for everything from target towing to combat missions. Until recently, however, the T-33 was never used to raise kittens.

That changed in October thanks to a discovery by a volunteer at the Hickory Aviation Museum in Hickory, North Carolina. When Bill Falls investigated noises coming from the facility’s T-33, which was on display outdoors, he discovered that a cat had crawled into the airplane to give birth to a litter. “I saw this furry little head pop up,” Falls told the Washington Post. “And suddenly there was another, then another and another.” There were five kittens in all, and the mother turned out to be a feral cat named Phantom that had made the museum grounds her home.

The museum staff decided to leave the cats alone in the T-33. Later that

month, when the kittens were old enough, the Humane Society of Catawba County captured them so they could be offered for adoption. The humane society also gave the kittens airplane-related names: Prowler, Hornet, Mohawk, Corsair and Falcon.

By the time production ended in 1959, Lockheed had built 5,691 T-33s. The museum’s airplane is a T-33A with the tail number 529 that is on loan from the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Now free of cats, it remains on display on the museum grounds.

AERO ARTIFACT

LIGHT MY FIRE

French-born Gervais Raoul Lufbery (who makes an appearance in the feature about the Nieuport 28 that starts on page 36) lived a peripatetic life before World War I. At 19 he relocated to the United States, where his father had moved when Raoul was young. He joined the U.S. Army (and earned his U.S. citizenship) and was posted to the Philippines. As an aviation mechanic he barnstormed around Asia, Africa and Europe. After World War I began, Lufbery flew for the French and later joined the American volunteers of the Lafayette Escadrille, where he continued racking up victories (his final official tally was 16). “He had broad shoulders, a perpetual scowl, crude speech, and apparently no emotions of any kind,” wrote historian Arch Whitehouse. Once America entered the war, Lufbery joined the 94th Aero Squadron.

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has several items related to Lufbery on display, including this cigarette lighter made out of a spark plug from the Nieuport 28 in which he made his final flight. Ironically, contemporaries said that one thing that obsessed the flier was a fear of fire in the air. On May 19, 1918, Lufbery was pursuing a German observation plane when an incendiary bullet set his Nieuport ablaze. Rather than burn to death, Lufbery jumped from his cockpit from a height of about 200 feet and was impaled on a fence. He was 33 years old. —Tom Huntington

MONUMENT MAN

Christian Arzberger is an automotive engineer by trade, but his passion is researching Allied bombers that crashed during World War II in his home province of Styria in eastern Austria. He has been a driving force in the effort to commemorate the crewmen and mark the crash sites of their aircraft. He has six monuments to his credit so far.

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND MILESTONES

Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba ushered in a period of conflict and tension with the United States that has lasted ever since the 1959 revolution. Tucked amid the saber-rattling was the Freedom Flight program of 1965-73, a rare example of cooperation between the two belligerent states. After coming to power in Cuba, Castro began aligning himself with the Soviet Union and its repressive version of Communism, prompting many well-off Cubans to leave the island. As Castro seized more private property, the middle class began leaving, too. At first, Castro welcomed ridding the island of those opposed to his political philosophy. In September 1965, he announced that Cubans wishing to join their families in the U.S. (except males of military age) could leave by boat, kicking off the mas-

An estimated 553 American and 31 Royal Air Force aircraft went down in Austria as they flew north from their Italian bases to hit targets in Germany or Austria. When he was ten, Arzberger learned that seven American flyers were buried in the cemetery in his hometown, Sankt Jakob im Walde. They were from two B-17 crews of the 301st Bombardment Group who crashed nearby on July 26, 1944. Fascinated, Arzberger gathered information and interviewed locals to find out what they remembered. Later, after completing college and working as an automotive engineer in nearby Graz, Arzberger resumed his research. In 2009, he oversaw the dedication of his first memorial, to honor the B-17 crewmembers buried in Sankt Jakob im Walde. He arranged to have the memorial unveiled by 87-year-old Bill Brainard, who had been radio operator on one of the fortresses that had gone down.

Christian Arzberger has created six monuments to Allied aircrews who crashed in Austria during the Second World War.

Organizing the other memorials followed the same pattern as the first. After researching the crash sites, Arzberger briefed officials in the closest towns, oversaw the creation of memorials and plaques and organized dedications. To date he’s also created monuments in Wenigzell (2010), Fischbach (2012), Ratten (2013), Strallegg (2015), and Bad Wimsbach-Neydharting (2017), and in 2022 his first memorial in Sankt Jakob im Walde was updated, enlarged and relocated. Arzberger also provides research support for memorial projects in other Austrian locales, such as one in Upper Austria.

Arzberger continues his investigations and research. He is at work on his next memorial, to be placed at Rettenegg to honor eight crewmembers killed when a Consolidated B-24 Liberator crashed there on May 10, 1944. He has also conducted research on an additional 20 crash sites and done preliminary research on many more. His work serves as a testimony to a spirit of peace and reconciliation between two formerly enemy nations. —Fred Allison

sive Camarioca Boatlift and, along with it, a humanitarian crisis. That led to the Freedom Flight program, for which Pan American World Airways was commissioned to fly two flights a day, five days a week to bring eligible Cubans to the United States. The first flight lifted off from Varadero Airport, near Matanzas, on December 1, 1965.

The program proved extremely popular in Cuba, with waitlists of up to two years—despite Castro’s pointed attempts to harass and shame those who wanted to leave. As it became apparent that Freedom Flights were exacerbating a Cuban brain drain, Castro grew wary. He suspended flights for six months in 1972 before halting the program altogether in 1973. By then nearly 300,000 Cubans had escaped the island for American shores. The last Freedom Flight touched down in Miami on April 6, 1973—50 years ago this spring. —Larry Porges

MADE IN FRANCE

ONCE LÉON DELAGRANGE TOOK UP FLYING, HE NEVER LOOKED BACK

“Contagious enthusiasm.” That phrase describes early French aviator Léon Delagrange, who helped spread the gospel of pow ered heavier-than-air flight through Europe during the first decade of the twentieth century.

AVIATORS

Ferdinand Léon Delagrange was born into a well-to-do family on March 13, 1872, in Orléans, France, his father being the owner of a textile factory. Young Delagrange studied art at École des Beaux-Arts and became a respected sculptor before heavier-than-air flying machines grabbed his attention in 1907. Then he totally immersed himself in aviation, joining the Aéro-Club de France and getting elected president. He earned French pilot license number 3. “I believe that the aeroplane is destined to become the bicycle of the airs in tomorrow’s world,” he predicted.

After meeting brothers and aircraft builders Gabriel and Charles Voisin, Delagrange bought a machine from them. Like Delagrange, Gabriel Voisin had been a student of École des Beaux-Arts before turning to aviation. He worked in partnership with Louis Blériot but the two had a falling out and Voisin established his own aircraft manufacturing business with his brother. In addition to making custom-order machines, the brothers designed a pusher biplane powered by a 50-hp Antoinette engine. With a box tail and vertical partitions between the wings, the plane resembled a giant box-kite. A canard provided attitude control and a rudder gave yaw control, both operated by a control wheel that moved fore and aft and side to side. But without ailerons or wing warping the craft lacked roll control, which resulted in uncoordinated, skidding turns. Because of this lack of turn coordination, some question whether it was truly a controllable heavier-than-air machine, which in

Top:

Above: Delagrange often flew with his friend, the artist and sculptor Thérèse Peltier, who became the first woman to pilot an airplane.

turn casts doubt on the validity of any records set in it.

Delagrange took his first tentative flight in his machine, the Voisin-Delagrange (the Voisins named their planes after the customers who bought them) on November 5, 1907. After damaging the machine in a hard landing, he ordered another, the Voisin-Delagrange II. He first flew it on January 20, 1908.

In the meantime, another Frenchman, Henri Farman, also bought a Voisin biplane. Being more mechanically inclined than Delagrange, Farman made improvements to his machine that Delagrange soon incorporated on his. The two aviators enjoyed a friendly rivalry as they each set records for distance and endurance. On March 21, 1908, Farman became the first airplane passenger when he went aloft with

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Delagrange. (The Wright brothers didn’t fly a passenger until May 14. Ernest Archdeacon, a French lawyer and aviation enthusiast, sometimes receives credit as the first airplane passenger in Europe after he flew with Farman on May 29, 1908.)

On March 16, 1908, Delagrange made five flights of 500 to 600 meters (1,640 to 1,969 feet), which made him the first European flier to best the longest flight the Wrights had made (852 feet) on December 17, 1903. On March 20, he flew a circle of about 700 meters (2,297 feet). On April 10, Delagrange flew 2,500 meters (8,202 feet) though his wheels did touch the ground once. The following day, he flew an official distance of 3,925 meters (12,877 feet) thus beating Farman’s distance of 2004.8 meters (6,577 feet). Delagrange’s flight unofficially was 5,575 meters (18,291 feet) but since his wheels touched the ground at the 3,925-meter mark he was not credited with the entire distance.

During the summer of 1908, Delagrange toured Italy with his airplane, flying an exhibition for King Victor Emmanuel III and setting distance and endurance records. On June 22, he flew 16 kilometers (9.94 miles) in 16 minutes and 30 seconds, setting an official distance and

endurance record. The next day, he flew 17 kilometers (10.56 miles) in 18 minutes and 30 seconds.

On July 8 in Turin, Delagrange flew with his friend and travel companion, the artist and sculptor Thérèse Peltier, who wrote articles of the flights for French newspapers. Some sources say she was the first woman to fly in a powered heavier-than-air machine, though others credit Mademoiselle P. Van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie as the first after she flew with Farman in Ghent, Belgium, on May 31, 1908. Peltier, however, did enter the record books as the first woman to pilot an airplane when she flew Delagrange’s airplane 200 meters (656 feet) in a straight line at about 2.5 meters (8 feet) altitude in Turin.

Upon returning to France, Delagrange and Farman continued their friendly rivalry. In September, Delagrange flew 25 kilometers (16 miles) and by October Farman topped his distance by flying 40 kilometers (25 miles). Peltier continued accompanying Delagrange; on September 17 she flew with him on a 30 minute and 26 second flight. Though she continued to fly she did not pursue a license.

The world’s first air meet took place on May 23, 1909, at PortAviation, about 12 miles south of Paris. The meet drew only four aviators and though none of them completed the ten 1.2-kilometer (.75 mile) laps, Delagrange managed to fly a little over halfway and was declared the winner.

The first international air meet took place August 22-29 at Reims, France, and drew 22 aviators. The meet featured the inaugural Gordon Bennett Trophy competition. Delagrange was overshadowed by other entrants, but according to one source he placed tenth for speed and eighth for distance. He fielded three Blériot monoplanes and one Voisin biplane, having recruited Hubert Le Blon, Georges Prévoteau and Léon Molon as pilots. Delagrange flew his own Voisin-Delagrange III. Delagrange also traveled to England to fly at a meet in Doncaster. Held in October 1909, the event was England’s first air meet. Delagrange’s team of fliers from Reims was there and Delagrange set a speed record of 49.9 mph, though it could not be officially approved since the meet wasn’t sanctioned by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. He also won the Nicholson Cup for the fastest five laps around the flying field.

On January 4, 1910, the airfield at Croix d’Hins, near Bordeaux, a site of early flying experiments, held an official inauguration ceremony. Delagrange agreed to demonstrate his Blériot XI, powered by a 50-hp Gnome rotary engine rather than the original 25-hp Anzani. The ceremony originally was scheduled for December, but bad weather forced a postponement. Weather remained poor on January 4 with strong gusty winds, yet Delagrange took to the sky. He completed two circuits around the field and was rounding a turn on his third circuit when the wings collapsed. Delagrange died in the crash, the first of several fatal Blériot accidents that would plague the machine. Grieving, Thérèse Peltier walked away from aviation forever. The field at Croix d’Hins eventually closed.

Delagrange’s death fueled skepticism about the new field of aviation. “The death of Léon Delagrange, crusht [sic] under the wreck of his falling aeroplane at Bordeaux last week, raises again the question whether the aeroplane is not to be classed with the tightrope and the ‘loop-the-loop,’ rather than to be considered seriously as a practical means of locomotion,” noted the January 15, 1910, issue of The Literary Digest. Despite such skepticism, flying machines advanced far beyond anything even Delagrange imagined and became much more than simply “the bicycle of the airs.”

In the blockbuster film, when a strapping Australian crocodile hunter and a lovely American journalist were getting robbed at knife point by a couple of young thugs in New York, the tough Aussie pulls out his dagger and says “That’s not a knife, THIS is a knife!” Of course, the thugs scattered and he continued on to win the reporter’s heart.

Our Aussie friend would approve of our rendition of his “knife.”

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“The feel of this knife is unbelievable...this is an incredibly fine instrument.” — H., Arvada, CO

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G.I. JOE VS. THE VOLCANO

IN 1935 TWO U.S. ARMY BOMBER SQUADRONS RECEIVED UNIQUE ORDERS—TO FIGHT AN ERUPTION

Christmas Day 1935 turned out to be a busy one for the 23rd and 72nd Bombardment Squadrons of the U.S. Army Air Corps in Hawaii. Stationed at Luke Field on Ford Island, inside Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, the soldiers spent the holiday preparing for an unusual mission: dropping live ordnance on an erupting volcano.

Keystone bombers like this B-3 were the last biplanes the Army Air Corps ever ordered. In December 1935 the Army used Keystone B-3s and B-6s to try to stop a volcano’s eruption in Hawaii. The results of the mission remain questionable.

LOG

On the orders of the Hawaiian Division’s intelligence officer, groundcrews made sure the 10 Keystone B-3 and B-6 biplane bombers were ready for the first-of-its-kind operation. The squadrons would fly from Oahu to the big island of Hawaii and bomb the Mauna Loa volcano to stop it from spewing lava that threatened the community of Hilo and its 20,000 residents.

This bizarre scenario began November 21, when Mauna Loa started erupting. Thomas Jaggar, founder of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, became concerned by what he saw on the volcano’s north face. Red-hot magma was flowing through lava tubes at the rate of about one mile per day. It wouldn’t be long before it placed Hilo in danger. Jaggar decided to approach the Army and see if the military could do something to cut off the lava flow.

Explosives had been considered before to stop the volcano. When Mauna Loa erupted in 1881, local officials discussed the idea of using dynamite to shut off the lava flow but never followed through. Jaggar was thinking the Army could send an overland expedition to set off TNT charges, but chemist Guido Giacometti suggested that Army bombers might be more effective. Jaggar traveled to the Hawaiian

District headquarters at Schofield Barracks and met with the intelligence officer there. He was Lt. Col. George S. Patton Jr., who would later gain fame as one of World War II’s most successful and controversial generals.

Patton approved the scheme and assigned the operation to the Army Air Corps’ Lt. Col. Asa N. Duncan, commander of the 5th Composite Group at Luke Field. Duncan gave orders to the 23rd and 72nd bomber squadrons, accompanied by a detachment from the 50th and 4th observation squadrons, to prepare for a unique mission.

On December 26, 10 bombers, two amphibious planes and two observation aircraft flew to Hilo Airport, where an operations base was established. The weapons and groundcrews traveled to Hilo by ship. After refueling, one of the seaplanes took Jaggar and some of the bomber pilots to identify the lava tubes he had selected as targets, located about 8,500 feet up

the northeast slope of Mauna Loa.

With the objectives clearly defined, soldiers affixed ordnance to the bombers’ wings. The aircraft were light bombers built by Pennsylvania-based Keystone Aircraft. The B-3 was a biplane powered by twin Pratt & Whitney R-1690-3 engines; the B-6 was similar, with more powerful R-1820-1 engines. (Keystone bombers, including the B-6, were the last biplanes the U.S. Army Air Corps ordered.) Each plane was fitted with 600-pound MK 1 demolition bombs, as well as 300-pound dummy bombs for aiming purposes.

The next day, the pilots flew two missions of five bombers each. They first dropped their dummy ordnance for sighting, then made final runs and released the MK 1 bombs at two locations. Ground observers reported direct hits with the 20 bombs. Lt. Col. Duncan flew in one of the observation planes to check on the results. “It was found that five bombs hit the stream itself, three in the flowing lava of the first target and two directly above the tube of molten lava of the second target,” he reported. “One of these caved in the tunnel. Three other craters were within five feet of the stream, the explosions throwing ashes into the red lava. Two others were within 20 feet of the target.” Duncan said the pilots estimated that “seven other bombs fell within 50 feet of the stream.”

The bombers had been spot-on with their attack and the magma flow began to slow. It ceased altogether within a few days, and Hilo was saved from being wiped off the map. Jaggar was pleased with the results and thanked the Army Air Corps for their efforts. “The Army, on one day’s work, has stopped a lava flow, which might have continued indefinitely and have caused incalculable damage to the forest, water resources and city,” he stated in the Air Corps News Letter of January 15, 1936.

Others, including the pilots, remained unconvinced the aerial bombings had actually made much of an effect. Scientists believed then—and still do—that the volcano likely ceased erupting on its own. Harold T. Stearns, a government geologist who flew in one of the bombers and later wrote Geology of the State of Hawaii, didn’t think the explosives had stopped the flow of lava at all. “I am sure it was a coincidence,” he wrote.

In 1942, the Army Air Forces bombed Mauna Loa again, this time to prevent Japanese vessels offshore from using the glowing lava to spot the island. Again, the results were mixed, with most volcanologists believing that the eruption stopped by itself. Unexploded ordnance from

both missions was found at the site in 2020.

To this day, the 5th Composite Group—now the 23rd Bomb Squadron of the 5th Bomb Wing, stationed at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota—is remembered for its strange encounter with Mauna Loa. In fact, the squadron’s patch, featuring bombs striking an erupting vol cano, seemingly commemorates that moment in its history.

Except it doesn’t. According to historical records, an early version of the patch showing the bombs and volcano was approved by the Secretary of War on September 20, 1931—four full years before the historic bombing mission. Instead, the artwork was intended to symbolize the unit’s proximity to Mauna Loa as well as its firepower—two things that just happened to intersect in December 1935.

1935 and its lava soon threatened the town of Hilo. Above: The 23rd Bombardment Squadron’s patch may seem to commemorate the unit’s attempt to silence the volcano with bombs, but the design actually predates the mission.

The little-remembered Spiteful was the last iteration of the famous and long-lived line of Supermarine Spitfires. It was also noteworthy as the fastest British piston-engine fighter to enter production, although few were built before the project was cancelled. The Spiteful had taken too long to develop and did not reach production until World War II was over and jet-powered fighters were coming into use. Nevertheless, its protracted development did allow it to play a transitionary role in the Jet Age.

In September 1942 Britain’s Air Ministry asked Supermarine to improve the Spitfire’s flying qualities at high speeds. The latest versions were approaching the speed of sound in power dives, and the effects of compressibility—the shock waves and instability created by the air flowing over the wing or tail at such high speeds—were becoming a problem. That phenomenon soon became known as the “sound barrier,” which would not be broken until the advent of high-performance rocket

and jet-powered aircraft in the late 1940s.

In the case of the Spitfire, the engineers determined that the best solution to the compressibility issue was to reduce drag by replacing the famous elliptical wing with a smaller one of an entirely new design. The new wing would have a shorter span and a straight-tapered planform, with the wing area reduced from 242 to 210 square feet. In addition, it had a thinner, laminar-flow section. The thickest part of the laminar-flow section was farther back on the wing’s surface than it was on a conventional wing and that moved the point of boundary layer separation—where the smoothly flowing air lifts off the wing surface—farther back as well. The result was to reduce skin-friction drag and enhance control at higher speeds. The shorter span was also expected to increase the fighter’s rate of roll. Other departures from the traditional Spitfire design included the introduction of a wide-track, inward-retracting landing gear to improve ground handling and an increased armament of four 20mm cannons. The new version of the Spitfire was deemed sufficiently different to be given a whole new name, the Spiteful.

The disadvantage of laminar-flow wings was that they required far more precise manufacturing tolerances than conventional wings. Even small imperfections of shape or finish could have a detrimental effect on performance. The

Spiteful’s new wing took such a long time to design and build that the Air Ministry criticized the company for its slow progress. In addition, the Supermarine design and development staff was deeply involved with developing other improved versions of the Spitfire. As a result, the first Spiteful prototype, a Spitfire XIV fitted with the new laminar-flow Spiteful wings, did not make its first flight until June 30, 1944. The first true Spiteful prototype, which also included a new fuselage with a slightly raised cockpit to improve visibility over the long nose, did not fly until January 1945.

Like the Spitfire, the new fighter was supposed to come in two versions, one with the Rolls-Royce Merlin and the other with the Griffin engine. However, the Merlin version was cancelled by the time the wing was ready, leaving only the more powerful Griffin-engine Spiteful. The new fighter was 32 feet 11 inches long, had a wingspan of 35 feet and a gross weight of 9,950 pounds. Its 2,375-hp Griffin gave it a service ceiling of 42,000 feet and maximum speed of a blistering 483 mph. The Spiteful performed well and was generally pleasant to fly at high speeds, but the story was different at lower speeds, where the Spitfire proved noticeably superior. One problem was that the Spiteful would drop one wing without warning when it approached stall. Investigation revealed that when the Spiteful’s wing stalled, it began from the tip inward, whereas the Spitfire’s wing began to stall from the root outward, producing a gentler and more controllable stall. Supermarine introduced numerous design tweaks to resolve the Spiteful’s handling problems, including larger tail surfaces. The tweaks eventually made the Spiteful an acceptable fighter, but the modifications increased drag so much that the new aircraft did not markedly outperform existing production Spitfires. Furthermore, with the war rapidly coming to an end and jet fighters in the offing, the RAF regarded the Spiteful as redundant. As a result, on September 23, 1945, the Air Ministry cancelled its order. Supermarine delivered only 17 production Spitefuls and none ever reached operational squadrons.

In parallel with the Spiteful, Supermarine developed a carrier-based naval version of the new fighter. Called the Seafang, it differed from the Spiteful principally in having folding wings, a “sting” type tail hook, two contra-rotating propellers to reduce torque during take-off and room for reconnaissance cameras inside the fuselage. The Seafang’s development was even slower than the Spiteful’s and it was first flown

Top: This aircraft, with a longer fuselage than the Spitfire’s and with a redesigned wing, is considered the first true Spiteful prototype. It first flew in January 1945. Center: The Seafang was an attempt to create a Spiteful for the Royal Navy. It sported a pair of three-bladed, contra-rotating propellers. Above: The wings of the Spitfire (left) and Spiteful show their obvious differences.

in January 1946. The Royal Navy soon abandoned it in favor of the Hawker Sea Fury and the de Havilland Sea Hornet. The navy did order 89 examples of the Supermarine Seafire FR 47, which was similar to the Seafang and eventually saw combat during the Korean War.

The Spiteful represented the absolute apex of piston-engine fighter development. Its story might have ended differently had it entered production a year earlier, but it arrived too late. The Spitfire became legend because it was the right airplane in the right place at the right time, but the Spiteful was lost to obscurity. Nevertheless, its heritage did live on. The laminar-flow wings developed for the Spiteful were subsequently fitted to Supermarine’s first production jet fighter, the Attacker, of which 185 were manufactured.

COME FLY WITH US

PORTFOLIO

Once upon a time there was a “golden age” of air travel, when passengers wore suits and dresses to fly and airlines created colorful posters to tempt those well-dressed customers to exotic destinations like…Minnesota.

But not just Minnesota. Airlines used posters to tout the appeal of destinations all over the world—and to persuade potential customers that their carriers were the best way to get there.

This was in the days when most people planning a trip had to visit a travel agent. Perhaps an eye-catching poster, one featuring the latest airliner soaring over a scenic vista, would be just

Opposite, clockwise from far left: A Canadian Pacific poster from the 1950s balances the beauty of Hawaii with the appeal of flying there in a pressurized Douglas DC-6; Deutsche Lufthansa features a Junkers Ju-52 and a winged figure flying over Berlin at the time of the 1936 Olympics; Philippine Air Lines shows potential customers in the 1950s how the company could send them flying in all directions from Manila. Left: In a 1950s offering from Northwest Airlines, New York’s Statue of Liberty remains impassive as a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser passes overhead. The big propellerdriven Boeings flew for Northwest until September 1960.

the thing to seal the deal.

In his book The Art of the Airways , Geza Szurovy traces the airline poster back to 1914, when the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line in Florida issued one to promote its “fast passenger and express service.” Early airline posters touted not just the novelty of flight, but also its safety. Once air travel became less novel after World War II, the posters stressed the destination, with the airplanes often reduced to a tiny image streaking across the top. Many of the art-

ists who did these works have retreated into anonymity but some—like David Klein, who created the TWA San Francisco poster on the opposite page—became known for their poster work. Seeing images like these may make you feel nostalgic for a time when airline travel seemed a little magical. The posters may also make you wistfully contemplate airlines that have vanished, like bird species gone extinct. What remains is the allure of travel—no matter what you’re wearing.

Opposite page: A United DC-6 overflies Yosemite; a TWA Boeing 707 passes the Golden Gate Bridge; an American DC-7 soars through Texas; and a TWA Constellation approaches L.A. This page: Braniff Airways became international in 1947 but also flew to U.S. destinations like Chicago (with a 707 in this case).

SPRING 2023

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

It’s something like running into a celebrity.

That’s how I feel when I see in person an airplane that we have covered in Aviation History. I’ve had that experience several times recently. Last fall I visited the American Heritage Museum in Massachusetts and got a close look at the Nieuport 28 that appears on this issue’s cover. As you’ll read in the article by Jon Guttman that starts on page 36, this is the world’s only flyable example of the type and had only recently returned to the sky after a lengthy restoration in Sweden. When I saw it, the World War I biplane seemed a little out of place, sitting on the museum’s main floor surrounded by hardware from more modern wars. It had returned to the United States only about a month earlier and had been flying at an airshow the weekend before, so I guess it was still waiting for its permanent home. It would have looked great no matter the setting, as if it had just rolled out of the factory. (Keep this to yourself: When no one was looking I stepped over the ropes surrounding the airplane so I could peer into the cockpit.)

Another airplane that appears in this issue, the Boeing 247D that Roscoe Turner flew in the 1934 MacRobertson International Air Race (see the feature that starts on page 26), is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I visited the museum in October when it reopened some of the galleries that had been closed for renovation and I saw the Boeing in the expansive America by Air Gallery, which it shares with other air transport stalwarts like the Ford Trimotor and the Douglas DC-3. I used to work in the museum building some years ago and I had always been fascinated by the 247. Squint a bit (and mentally add a couple engines) and you can

easily see its ancestral relationship to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, which was one of my favorite airplanes growing up. Way back in 1996 I was lucky enough to fly in the world’s only flightworthy 247, which had returned to the air after restoration by the Museum of Flight in Seattle. It was quite an experience—like taking a trip in a time machine. The 247 is also a surprisingly small airplane, at least by today’s airline standards. That airplane made its final flight in 2016, so if you hope to fly in a Boeing 247 someday, you are out of luck.

I saw another airplane the magazine has covered when I visited the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York, on a beautiful (if a bit windy) fall day. Back in the Autumn 2022 issue’s Briefing section, Stephan Wilkinson wrote about the 1912 Etrich Taube replica that Mike Fithian finished last year. It’s now at the aerodrome and it was really something to see it lift off and float through the air, like a steampunk dragonfly.

Whenever I visit places like this, I take lots of photos and videos and post them on our Facebook page and on TikTok and other social media outlets. I love print magazines as much as anyone, but you can do things in the digital realm that just aren’t possible with ink-on-paper magazines. But then again, there was also a time when they said that if man were meant to fly, he’d have wings…

SECOND

SECOND

Top: Boeing’s Model 40A was a mail plane that utilized welded steel for its fuselage structure. Center: With its Model 80, Boeing began focusing on passengers over mail. Bottom: The all-metal Model 221 Monomail was another step forward for Boeing.

The Boeing 247 was the end result of a battle between company management and its engineers. Unfortunately, the engineers lost. Although enshrined today as “the first modern airliner”—and it certainly looked the part—the 247 was actually too small and low-powered to make it as a money-making passenger carrier. It was the wrong airplane at the right time.

That time was the early 1930s, when a series of events and innovations was transforming air transportation. Until then commercial aviation had been a cold, miserable, noisy, cramped, vibratory and often vomitous experience. Airline passengers flew aboard drafty biplanes, three-engine antiques with fixed landing gear and a shrubbery of struts and rigging. Operators offered no creature comforts, and passengers were little more than an afterthought, since carrying government-subsidized airmail paid the bills. According to Transcontinental and Western Air pilot Daniel W. Tomlinson IV, “Flying in the old Ford [Trimotors] was an ordeal…. The flight was deafening. The metal Ford shook so much that it was an uncomfortable experience. It surprised me that people would pay money to ride in the thing.”

At that time, the Boeing Aircraft Company had no experience designing passenger airplanes. It built biplane pursuits for both the Army and Navy, as well as two mail plane designs and a surprisingly modern bomber for the Army. Boeing’s first passenger airplane was the 1925 Model 40A, a single-engine, fixed-gear biplane with space for just two passengers in a pair of tiny, handsomely wood-trimmed, enclosed cabins, each with its own door, below and ahead of the pilot’s open cockpit. The original plan was that those cabins could be occupied by a riding mechanic and, if necessary, a deadheading pilot.

Boeing built only one straight Model 40, since it was powered by an oily and obsolete Liberty V-12 engine. The company replaced it with the just-introduced 410-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial. The Wasp was 200 pounds lighter than the World War I Liberty, which meant the new Model 40A could carry 200 pounds more mail. The slightly widened 40C could also accommodate four riders.

The Model 40s all made extensive use of welded steel tubing for the fuselage structure,

since Boeing had pioneered the precise fitting, beveling and electric arc-welding of thin-wall steel tubes. The company initially applied the technique to a 1923 Army contract for 22 de Havilland DH-4s, with welded steel tubing replacing the original spruce-framed fuselage. They were called DH-4Ms, the M standing for “modernized,” not “metal.” (Outmoded as they were, the DH-4Ms made at least a minor amount of history. In 1927, serving as Marine Corps Boeing O2B-1s, several carried out the first dive-bombing attacks ever flown by the U.S., against Nicaraguan rebels.)

Despite the discomfort, passenger demand soon outstripped the Model 40C’s four seats. Most of these airplanes were flying for Boeing Air Transport, which the company had formed in 1927 when it won the lucrative San Francisco-Chicago airmail route. Boeing also realized that it would be convenient to have a captive customer for its civil products. (After a variety of name changes, BAT became what we now know as United Airlines, which is still happy to fly Boeings.)

Boeing realized that it needed a bigger passenger carrier, so it intro -

duced the Model 80, a not particularly attractive 12-passenger trimotor biplane soon lengthened to carry 18. The 80 was Boeing’s first real focus on passengers rather than mail. Boeing considered the airplane to be the Pullman of the skies—a luxurious railway coach with wings, though that was largely a PR fantasy. The 80A did have leather chairs for seats, a small amount of hot and cold running water in a tiny lavatory and a heated cabin. The 80A was also the airliner that finally convinced pilots they didn’t have to sit in open cockpits so they could feel the wind on their cheeks and keep the airplane trimmed and coordinated like human yaw strings. They also didn’t have to squint through rain and snow at the engine nacelles to read the pressure and temperature instruments. In the Boeing, those instruments were on the flight-deck panel. The Model 80A also introduced to aviation what would quickly become an airline necessity: the flight attendant, then called a stewardess. Boeing

Air Transport hired registered nurses to fly aboard its Model 80As, supposedly to cater to the possible medical needs of passengers. In fact, their presence was a goad to potential businessman passengers who still distrusted aviation. “Afraid to fly? Well, here’s a young lady braver than you.”

Boeing had been lining its mail plane cargo compartments with an aluminum alloy called Duralumin to keep metal fittings on mailbags from tearing through the fuselage fabric. Duralumin was the first metal light enough to be carried aloft en masse by the engines of the time, and Boeing chief engineer Claire Egtvedt

COMMERICAL AVIATION WAS A COLD, MISERABLE, NOISY, CRAMPED, VIBRATORY AND OFTEN VOMITOUS EXPERIENCE.

247s near completion at the Boeing plant in Seattle. Left: The airplane pictured in this Boeing ad crashed in Indiana on October 10, 1933, following a midair explosion, apparently caused by an explosive device in the baggage compartment. No suspects were ever identifed.

mused that perhaps an entire stressed-skin, semi-monocoque fuselage could be formed of Duralumin. (Jack Northrop had already figured that out with the Northrop Alpha, so Boeing bought Northrop’s company, Avion.) That was a challenge to Boeing’s conservative approach, as well as the industry’s. Until then, the Ford and Fokker technique was to use corrugation to provide structural strength for metal, but it turned out that the drag of the corrugations, even though they were in line with the assumed airflow, was greater than anticipated. Egtvedt called those airplanes “flying washboards” and he intuited that a rounded fuselage would create less drag than the boxy style of the time.

Egtvedt had moved on to Boeing’s executive ranks by the time the company’s pioneering Model 200/221 Monomail emerged under the stern gaze of engineer Charles “Monty” Monteith in 1930. (Monteith was so conservative he insisted that his staff draw up just-in-case alternative biplane configurations for every Boeing design, even the 247.) The Monomail was an all-metal, semi-monocoque, retractable-gear design with a neatly cowled radial engine. The Model 200 was a pure mail plane, the 221 a six-passenger transport soon to be stretched to accommodate eight. Both variants set new

standards for low-drag aerodynamic efficiency—so much so that the Model 200/221 outflew its powerplant. With a prop pitched for a reasonable takeoff, the airplane cruised too fast to make use of that blade angle. The airplane needed a variable-pitch propeller, which hadn’t yet been developed.

Much of what made the Monomail special was carried over to an imaginative Boeing Army bomber contender, the YB-9. Though Boeing built only seven YB-9s—it was trumped by Martin’s faster and more modern B-10—the B-9 did have one new feature that became commonplace for multi-engine aircraft. Its engines were not carried in draggy, free-standing, strutted nacelles but were faired into the leading edges of the wing. This created better prop efficiency and smoother airflow over the wings.

On March 31, 1931, a pug-nosed TWA Fokker F-10 trimotor crashed outside Bazaar, Kansas, killing the much-admired Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. The accident happened because the Fokker’s wooden wing spar had rotted and failed, moving the Department of Commerce essentially to ban trees for airliner construction. Both Boeing and Douglas Aircraft immediately embarked upon the design of all-

metal airliners.

The Northrop Alpha, the Boeing Monomail and B-9, the Knute Rockne crash, the adoption of stressed-skin semi-monocoque construction, cantilever wings, retractable landing gear, drag reduction through streamlining…once all this came together, the time had come for Boeing to create the 247.

Initially, Boeing management wanted to build a new metal airliner the size of the 18-passenger Model 80A, but cautious Monty Monteith felt that building a fast airplane of that size would be “like flying a barn door in a Kansas windstorm.” He advocated for a smaller design. Those initial 247 proposals included a biplane trimotor and a high-wing monoplane twin before Boeing finalized the low-wing configuration.

By 1929, Boeing had acquired a number of aviation-industry companies, including Stearman, Chance Vought, Sikorsky, Pratt & Whitney and, in 1930, Jack Northrop’s Avion. It now called itself the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, so there were a number of cooks stirring the broth that became the Boeing 247. Two of the most knowledgeable chefs were Frederick Rentschler, founder and president of

The 247’s speed allowed its users to call it the “3-Mile-A-Minute” airliner. Here United Air Lines also touted the airplane’s “warm, spacious cabins” and the “stewardess service.” None of that was enough to make the 247 competitive in the burgeoning market for airliners.

Top: Three Marx Brothers (Zeppo, Harpo and Chico) clown before taking a flight on a 247. Above: Once aboard, the Marxes would have been seated in a cabin that looks cramped by today’s standards, but was considered the lap of luxury in 1933.

Pratt & Whitney, and his chief engineer, George Mead. (Mead designed many of P&W’s most powerful radials, including the ubiquitous R-2800.) But the pilots who flew for Boeing’s United Air Transport stuck their spoons in the design discussion as well.

Pratt had two engines that could power the 247: the 1,860-cubic-inch Hornet radial and the 1,340-cubic-inch Wasp. Using the Hornet would have resulted in a 16,000-pound airplane. To quote Henry Holden’s book The Boeing 247: the First Modern Commercial Airplane, “The pilots flatly refused to accept the Hornet engines, stat-

ing that a 16,000-pound airplane was too heavy and too powerful to land safely at some smaller airports.” Their demand for a 12,000-pound Wasp-powered airplane, which became the 247, was a fatal mistake. It meant the 247 would be an unprofitable 10-passenger transport at a time when 14 passengers was typical and Douglas’s DC-3 would have seats for 21. Even the Ford Trimotor held 11.

But a smaller airplane meant the two Wasps would produce a cruise speed of up to 165 mph, making the 247 briefly the fastest multi-engine airliner in the world. Cruise speed would go up to 180 mph with the 247D version, allowing United to advertise it as the “3-Mile-a-Minute Airliner.” The 247D had uprated 550-hp Wasp engines, two-blade variable-pitch props, a full set of deicing boots, efficient NACA engine cowls and other detail improvements, eventually increasing the 247’s top speed to 200 mph, cruise from 161 to 189, range from 485 miles to 750, service ceiling from 18,400 feet to 25,400 and single-engine ceiling from a paltry 2,000 feet to 11,500. (The 247 was the first twin-engine airplane able to fly on one engine.) There were other upgrades in radio and navigation gear, many of which would also find their way aboard earlier 247 models.

The D was the only 247 production variant. The 247B was to be a flying post office with a small staff of mail clerks doing in-flight mail sorting. The 247F was planned as a 12-passenger, Hornet-engine model. And the 247S would have had Besler steam engines, a possibility that Boeing briefly pursued because Beslers, though heavy, were near-instantly reversible, which would have permitted very short landings. (Only one Besler ever flew, in a Travel Air 2000. The engine put out about 150 hp but weighed a quarter of a ton.)

The first 247 took to the sky on February 8, 1933. By the time it stopped producing them later that year, Boeing had built only 75, and it reserved 60 of them for its in-house airline, Boeing Air Transport. The United Aircraft Corporation bought 10 and the rest went to Luft Hansa and a buyer in China. Trans World Airlines president Jack Frye wanted to buy 247s but was rebuffed, so he immediately turned to Douglas Aircraft, which happened to be prototyping what became the DC-1. TWA funded the program and became its launch customer. (Douglas built only one DC-1; TWA actually got DC-2s, and soon thereafter DC-3s.) The DC-3 would end up putting the little Boeing out to pasture in less than three years of mainline service. Douglas ended up manufacturing some 16,000 DC-3s and its C-47 military variant. Boeing never sold another 247. So if nothing else, the 247 can take some credit for the ascension of the DC-3.

In certain ways, though, the 247 indeed was the first modern airliner, despite its overall failings. One of its innovations was pneumatic deicing boots on the wing and tail leading edges, which had been invented by one Thorp Hiscock, William Boeing’s brother-in-law. Hiscock saw an icedover flag shed its coating when the wind made it move, and he realized that if he could make the leading edge of a wing move by periodically pumping air through a rubber bladder, it too would shed ice. Monteith had resisted their installation, complaining that they added too much weight. He also feared (wrongly) that they would trap moisture and corrode the aluminum underneath them. The boots were initially fitted to the 247D, but were soon retrofitted to most earlier 247s, and Hiscock’s approach

near-universally prevailed until turbojet airliners showed up with an abundance of hot air, some of which could be pumped through the leading edges of their wings, tails and engine nacelles to melt ice.

The 247 also had control-surface trim tabs that were movable in flight. Until then, trim tabs were adjustable only on the ground. United operated a 247 as a flying laboratory, and it exposed the need for conductive trailing-edge wicks to dispel the static electricity that had been interfering with radio communication in metal aircraft, so static wicks were another 247 innova-

tion, as was a heated pitot tube. Perhaps most important, the 247D had hydraulic controllable-pitch propellers, which had just been developed by the French company Ratier and licensed in the U. S. by Thomas Hamilton, founder of the Hamilton Standard propeller company. The all-important hydraulic mechanism had been developed by Ham Standard engineer Frank W. Caldwell. In practice, the 247D’s props had two positions: fine pitch for takeoff and climb, coarse pitch for cruise. Though Monteith inevitably thought the props were too heavy to adopt, they turned out to

A United maintenance crew services one of the airline’s 247s. The engine they are working on is a Pratt & Whitney Wasp R-1340. Boeing, which chose the Wasp over the more powerful Pratt & Whitney Hornet, touted the 247 as the first twin-engine airplane capable of remaining in flight with only one engine.

Roscoe Turner (with wife, Carline) takes a photo break with his 247D before the MacRobertson race. Turner dubbed his engines “Nip” and “Tuck.” The 57 stands for sponsor Heinz of “57 varieties” fame.

substantially improve the 247’s takeoff performance and cruise speed.

Boeing was so weight-conscious about the 247 that it even eliminated the simple cutoff switches that shut off the retraction motors when the landing gear reached the full-up position. This resulted in a slew of burnt-out motors when busy pilots forgot to monitor the gear-retraction process. Boeing had even planned to forego painting its 247s in order to save 50 pounds of Duco enamel. Instead, they anodized the Duralumin to give the airplane a distinctive gray-green mien. The anodizing process was uneven, however, producing a patchwork of differently shaded panels that made passengers worry they were boarding an airliner that had been repaired after an accident. United eventually painted its 247s battleship gray.

The 247’s characteristic visual feature was its backward-sloping windshield, a beetle-browed configuration that Boeing adopted from various Fokker airliners because conventional windscreens reflected the instrument lights back into the cockpit at night. Unfortunately, all that Boeing accomplished with the backward-slanting glass was to reflect ground lights at night, which was especially bothersome during landings. Boeing engineers finally solved the problem by inventing the glareshield. Virtually all 247s were then fitted with conventional windscreens, which turned out to have a bit less drag.

The 1934 MacRobertson International Air Race, from London to Melbourne, Australia, was intended to be the 247’s moment of glory. Race ace Roscoe Turner leased a 247D from United and entered the contest with Clyde Pangborn as his copilot. Turner filled the airplane’s cabin with eight “Turner tanks” of extra gasoline to cut down on refueling stops. Of the 20 other entrants, De Havilland entered several of its achingly beautiful pure racers, the twin-engine Comet, and KLM came to the starting line with a bone-stock Douglas DC-2 filled with three paying passengers riding its normal route to Australia, which included 14 en-route stops.

To nobody’s surprise, a de Havilland Comet was the ultimate winner. To everybody’s surprise, the KLM Douglas and its passengers finished second. The race-prepped Boeing 247D came in third— an awkward also-ran, just as it was in its airline life.

Fortunately for Boeing, the race had two categories: a flat-out, winnertake-all run and a second handicap category based on the entrant’s gross weight, horsepower, wing area, payload and other factors. United chose to enter its 247 in the handicap race, which gave it second place behind the DH Comet race plane, since the KLM DC-2 was entered in the unhandicapped category.

One smart PR move that Boeing and United did make was to underwrite a contest, sponsored by Popular Aviation magazine, to build flying models of the new 247. Some 4,500 sets of free plans were sent to young modelers, some of whom doubtless became future airline pilots. Boeing also cast small metal models of the 247 for employees to buy for $9.15 ($10.45 with working landing gear). Considering that it was the depth of the Great Depression and that those price tags were equivalent to over

Turner and his Boeing 247D placed third in the London-toMelbourne race. Taking second was a Douglas DC-2 (at left), the airliner that led to the 247-eclipsing DC-3.

Turner’s Boeing is now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. This is a view of the cockpit as Turner and Clyde Pangborn would have seen it.

$200 today, we can safely assume they sat only on executive desks.

Boeing apologists often blame the 247’s failure as a viable airliner on the fact that its wing spar stretched across the cabin, creating a shin-banging obstacle for passengers. In fact, the wing’s main spar formed a low barrier between the passenger cabin and the flight deck, so its obtrusiveness would only have been apparent to the captain and first officer, who were paid to step over spars. The smaller secondary spar, which ran under the fourth row of passenger seats with a step to aid passage, would have been a minor inconvenience. Though perhaps not to the stewardesses who feared tripping on it while carrying a tray of coffee. But stewardesses didn’t doom airliner designs. A more likely theory? It’s a convenient myth.

United began phasing out its 247s in 1934, as TWA DC-2s stole much of its traffic. Many went to smaller airlines that served as feeders for United’s main routes. Some served in the U.S.

Army Air Forces and the Royal Canadian Air Force as C-73 multi-engine trainers and transports. One went to the Royal Air Force for use as a radar and electronics testbed, and in January 1945, it established the final entry on the 247’s making-history page by flying the first ever fully automatic blind landing.

One of the last passenger-carrying 247s was the “Reno Champagne Cruiser,” a pink-painted party bus that for two years in the mid-1950s flew the 65 miles between Washington, D.C., and Colonial Beach, Virginia, typically carrying legislators and their girlfriends to the semi-legal casinos in the Virginia town.

What a way to go.

Stephan Wilkinson is Aviation History ’s contributing editor. For further reading he recommends The Boeing 247: The First Modern Airliner by F. Robert van der Linden and The Boeing 247: the First Modern Commercial Airplane by Henry M. Holden.

THE 1934 RACE FROM LONDON TO AUSTRALIA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE 247’S MOMENT OF GLORY.

In April 2022, Swedish restorer Mikael Carlson takes his newly completed Nieuport 28 up for its first flight since the 1970s. Slated for donation to the Collings Foundation’s American Heritage Museum, the fighter sports a unique, transitory color scheme based on 1st Lt. Douglas Campbell’s on April 14, 1918, when he became the first American-trained fighter pilot to score an aerial victory.

AN AIRPLANE FOR THE YANKS

THE AMERICANS FLYING IN WORLD WAR I WANTED THE SPAD XIII. THEY GOT THE NIEUPORT 28 INSTEAD

Near dawn on April 2, 2022, a vision from the past accelerated down a grass airstrip in rural Sweden and lifted smoothly off the ground. The French biplane, the world’s only flyable Nieuport 28, was making its first flight since the 1970s, following a lengthy restoration by Swedish pilot and vintage aircraft restorer Mikael Carlson. Built in France in 1918, the Nieuport—serial number 512—had not seen combat in World War I but it had served with the United States Army Air Service (USAS) after the Armistice and appeared in several Hollywood war films following its retirement from service. In 2019 its owner donated the venerable airplane to the Collings Foundation’s American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts.

The airplane was shipped to Sweden for restoration and Carlson went to work. Overall, he found the Nieuport to be in excellent shape, and that included the original 160-hp Gnome Monosoupape 9N rotary engine. The cowling was not authentic and had to be replaced, part of the upper wing needed to be reconstructed and some other parts had to be refabricated and replaced. Carlson then had the entire airframe covered with authentic Irish linen. When it came time to choose a color scheme for the airplane, Carlson chose one that was both historic and unique: that of Nieuport N6164, which 1st Lt. Douglas Campbell was flying on April 14, 1918, when he scored the first aerial victory by an American-trained fighter pilot in the USAS in World War I.

And how did the vintage aircraft fly? “Put it this way,” Carlson said. “I can understand why the French gave the Nieuport 28 to the Americans and kept the better Spad XIII to themselves.”

One of the most elegant looking warplanes of its time, what was formally classified as the Nieuport 28.C1 (the “C” signifying chasseur, or fighter, and the “1” its single seat) first flew on June 14, 1917. Its biplane configuration marked an overdue departure from a series of sesquiplane (one and a half wing) fighters designed by Nieuport’s chief engineer, Gustave Delage, starting in 1914. Featuring a two-spar upper wing and a single-spar lower wing that served as a brace for the support cables, these Nieuport “V-strutters” handled well and provided their pilots with a superb downward view. By 1917, however, the sesquiplane layout was proving too fragile to accommodate more powerful engines or the second machine gun that was becoming standard. With that in mind, Delage returned to the proven format of a wire-braced biplane. Besides allowing a

Left: French-born Raoul Lufbery utilized his experience with the Lafayette Escadrille, Spa. 124, to teach newly arrived American pilots. Above: French soldiers examine Douglas Campbell’s Nieuport 28 of the 94th Aero Squadron at Gengoult aerodrome near Toul in April 1918.

power upgrade to the 160-hp Gnome engine, it would also allow installation of twin .303-inch synchronized Vickers machine guns.

The French government was initially impressed enough with the new fighter to award a production contract, but then cancelled the order because the Aéronautique Militaire was fully committed to the Spad XIII, with its sturdier airframe and 220-hp Hispano-Suiza 8B geared V-8 engine. That’s when the U.S. Army inadvertently became the Nieuport 28’s savior. Although the Army also preferred the Spad XIII, the French intended to equip their own escadrilles first. That led the USAS to order 297 Nieuports as a stopgap measure until the Spads became available.

The Americans found the Nieuport to be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it performed well, with a maximum speed of 123 mph, and it was highly maneuverable. Due to poor quality control, however, an inferior glue led to an alarming number of incidents in which the wing fabric tore away.

Another problem lay in the single-valve Monosoupape engine. To slow it down, the pilot needed to use a “blip switch” that cut the ignition in some of the cylinders. That led to fuel leaking from the valves and accumulating under the cowling, where it frequently burst into flames when the pilot restored ignition to all cylinders. On top of all that, engine vibrations often caused the rigid and improperly annealed copper-tube fuel lines to crack—again with fiery

potential. One oft-seen remedy was cutting slots in the lower part of the cowling to let the excess fuel stream out.

The first 36 Nieuport 28s were issued to the 1st Pursuit Group, whose first two aero squadrons, the 94th and 95th, had reached France by February 1918 while its other two, the 27th and 147th, were organizing in the States. New though it was, the 94th had the benefit of transferees with previous experience in the French air service. In March its com mander was Major John W. F. M. Huffer, a former member of the Lafayette Flying Corps (LFC) with experience in escadrilles N.95 and N.62 over the Western Front and F.36 over Italy. His operations officer, French-born Major Gervais Raoul Lufbery, had flown with the famed American volunteer Lafayette Escadrille, Spa. 124, and was the war’s highest scoring American ace thus far with 16 victories. Its three flight leaders, Captain James Norman “Jimmy” Hall, David McKelvey Peterson and Kenneth Marr, were also Spa.124 veterans.

The first Nieuport 28s arrived without guns but on March 6 Lufbery, disgusted at the delay, led the 94th’s first front-line patrol in unarmed airplanes, his “lucky” wingmen being 1st Lts. Douglas Campbell and Edward

V. Rickenbacker. Campbell, the son of an astronomer, was born on June 7, 1896, near San Francisco, attended Harvard and Cornell universities and typified the elite young collegiates who composed most of the 1st Pursuit Group’s flying personnel. Rickenbacker did not. Born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 8, 1890, Edward Richenbacher, the son of Swiss immigrants, had Americanized his last name to “Rickenbacker” and said he added the middle name “Vernon”

Rickenbacker welcomed the 1st Pursuit Group’s new Spads, and he scored his last 20 of 26 victories with them. This photo was taken in August 1918 after the ace returned to the front following an operation for an ear infection.

“because it sounded classy.” He left school at age 12 when his father died, in order to support his family, became a race car driver in 1912 and in 1914 set a world speed record of 134 mph at Daytona, Florida. In spite of a lifelong fear of heights, Rickenbacker became fascinated with aviation but at 27 was considered too old to join the USAS once the U.S. entered the war. He enlisted in the Army instead, wangled a job as chauffeur to Col. William Mitchell and pestered the colonel—while falsely claiming to be 25— until he received a transfer to the USAS. In September 1917 he graduated from flight training in only 17 days.

Both Rickenbacker and Campbell would soon demonstrate the fruits of Lufbery’s tutelage.

The 94th finally received machine guns— albeit only enough to mount one per Nieuport— and flew its first armed patrol on March 28. The pilots now felt their squadron qualified to adopt an identifying insignia as French units did. Huffer suggested a stovepipe hat with stars and stripes as worn by Uncle Sam—which had been his own personal marking when he flew with N.62. Captain Paul H. Walters, the squadron surgeon, raised a cheer by proposing that, since the 94th’s hat was now “in the ring,” it be depicted accordingly. 1st Lt. John Wentworth, an architect in civilian life, designed the “Hat-

in-the-Ring” squadron’s definitive insignia.

On April 7 the 94th was temporarily detached to Gengoult aerodrome, a mile northeast of Toul, to support the French Eighth Army. Toul lay near a wedge-shaped salient centered on the city of Saint-Mihiel, which had been occupied by the Germans since late September 1914. The sector had been relatively quiet while the great battles had raged at Verdun, the Somme and Flanders, making the Toul sector a good one for breaking in the neophyte Americans. The 94th reached Gengoult on April 9 and Wentworth’s “Hat-in-the-Ring” began appearing on its Nieuports the next day.

Low clouds on April 14 promised a dull morning, until French observers reported two German aircraft flying south. Doug Campbell and 2nd Lt. Alan F. Winslow, another of the 94th’s LFC veterans with previous service in escadrille N.152, took their Nieuports in pursuit. At about 1,500 feet two German fighters emerged from the clouds. After a brief dogfight Winslow sent an Albatros D.Va crashing about 100 yards from the aerodrome. Ten seconds later Campbell sent his adversary, a Pfalz D.IIIa, down in flames less than half a mile away on the other side of the airfield.

It had taken only four minutes from takeoff for Campbell and Winslow to chalk up the 94th’s

first two confirmed successes. Campbell’s was the first by an American-trained aviator. On April 26, the French awarded both victors the Croix de Guerre. There was more to the story than met the eye, though. Campbell’s victim had been identified as Vizefeldwebel Antoni Wroniecki of Royal Württemberg Jagdstaffel 64, or Jasta 64w, who had reportedly died. Winslow’s was reported to be Unteroffizier Heinrich Simon, who emerged bruised but alive. In fact, both enemy pilots were alive. Under questioning, Wroniecki explained he was a Pole who hated the Germans and had been waiting for an opportunity to defect to the Allies. His saw his chance when he led Simon on patrol and contrived to get “lost.” As they approached Toul, however, he and Simon were jumped by Campbell and Winslow. To conceal the Pole’s switch of sides, the Allies said Wroniecki had been killed.

Assuming the pseudonym of Wroblewski, Antoni Wroniecki joined a Polish volunteer unit. In 1936 he entered Poland’s intelligence service and spent some time spying in Berlin. In World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, and he died of natural causes at the Polish RAF base in Blackpool, England, on March 31, 1941—almost 23 years after he first “died” in World War I.

The Nieuport 28 had served Campbell and Winslow well on April 14, but its flaws became evident in subsequent combats. On May 2, 1st Lt. James A. Meissner downed a Hannover CL.IIIa, but then most of his upper wing fabric tore loose as he pulled out of his dive. Meissner survived thanks to his skill and the fact that the Nieuport 28’s ailerons were mounted on the lower wing. Diving from an opponent during another encounter with Jasta 64w on May 7, Captain Jimmy Hall saw his upper wing fabric tear away, and then a 37mm anti-aircraft shell smashed his motor. Under the circumstances he was fortunate to survive the crash landing with just his nose and an ankle broken, but he was taken prisoner. Diving on three Albatros D.Vas over Richemont on May 17, Rickenbacker saw one spin down, but as he leveled out his upper wing fabric also stripped away. After spinning down to 1,100 yards altitude, “Rick” managed to gradually flatten out and made a crash landing at his aerodrome. The 94th’s most dramatic day since the capture of Jimmy Hall occurred on May 19, when a Rumpler from Armee Abteilung C ’s Reihenbildtrupp (long-range picture section) No. 3 crossed the lines and in the course of several fights its observer shot down Raoul Lufbery, who fell from his plane. An hour after Lufbery died, Doug Campbell drove another Rumpler down in flames near Flirey, killing its crew.

Rickenbacker earned his fifth victory on May 30, when he shot down a two-seater and became the first American-trained USAS fighter ace. While circling with a German fighter in the same fight, Meissner was grazed from above by another’s undercarriage, which tore the guy wires of his upper wing. After nursing his Nieuport back over the lines, Meissner was credited with the plane that collided with him. Having survived two such incidents, Meissner was proclaimed a pilot who didn’t need wings to fly by his squadron mates. He later commanded the 147th Aero Squadron and survived the war with eight victories. The markings of his Nieuport N6144 No.8 now grace the Nieuport 28 at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy annex.

Campbell became an ace on the last day of May when he sent a two-

Top: Shot down and taken prisoner in 1918, Walter B. Wanamaker of the 27th Aero Squadron (left) is reunited with his victor, Ernst Udet, at the Cleveland National Air Races in 1931. Udet gave Wanamaker the piece of rudder he had cut from the American’s Nieuport 28. Above: One of 12 Nieuport 28s acquired by the U.S. Navy takes off from a platform on a battleship’s main gun turret in an evaluation test.

seater crashing off the Limey-Montauville road, killing the crew. Later that afternoon, the 1st Pursuit Group finally reached full strength when the 27th Aero Squadron commanded by Maj. Harold E. Hartney and the 147th under Maj. Geoffrey H. Bonnell arrived from Epiez.

On June 5, Campbell and Meissner downed a Rumpler, wounding its observer, but Campbell was wounded in the back and had to be invalided out of the 94th. He wouldn’t return to the unit until the Armistice. Besides being one of the pio-

The Collings Foundation’s Nieuport underwent restoration in Sweden. From top: The Nieuport’s engine compartment and front during reconstruction; the completed airframe, waiting for its linen covering; a closeup of the cockpit.

neer USAS fighter pilots, Campbell was exceptional in that all six of his victories—and even one of the unconfirmed ones—corresponded with documented German casualties. He later became vice president and general manager of Pan Am World Airways and died at his home in Connecticut in 1990 at the age of 94.

On June 28, the 1st Pursuit Group moved to Touquin aerodrome, 20 miles southwest of Château-Thierry near the Marne, to participate in Allied efforts to stem what turned out to be the final German bid for victory. The Toul sector had given the 1st Pursuit Group pilots a relatively easy environment in which to hone their skills. They had done well and felt ready, willing and able to take on the enemy’s best— which was just what they were about to do. Instead of Albatros and Pfalz scouts, their principal opponent would be the Fokker D.VII, arguably the best fighter of the war, operated along the Marne by hardened veterans of three Jagdgeschwader, or fighter wings. JG.I, the original “Flying Circus” of the late Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, was now under Oberleutnant Hermann Göring and comprising Jasta 4, 6, 10 and 11. JG.II, commanded by Oberleutnant Rudolf Berthold, consisted of Jasta 12, 13, 15 and 19. JG III, led by Oberleutnant Bruno Loerzer, had Jasta Boelcke, 26, 27 and 36. Between these and a supporting cast of experienced Jagdstaffeln facing it, the 1st Pursuit Group was about to be thrust into the major leagues.

Among the earliest Nieuports lost was that of 2nd Lt. Walter B. Wanamaker of the 27th Aero, shot down by Jasta 4’s commander, Leutnant Ernst Udet, on July 2. Udet cut the serial number from Wanamaker’s rudder as a souvenir. Later, while stunt flying at the Cleveland National Air Races on September 6, 1931, Udet was reunited with Wanamaker—then a judge in Akron—and returned the trophy to him. It can be seen at the Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Between July 2 and August 1 the American Nieuport pilots were credited with 35 victories, although only a fraction of them match German loss records. Their own losses included 10 killed in action, four wounded and 12 taken prisoner. Among the dead was 1st Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, youngest son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, shot down in a Nieuport of the 95th Aero Squadron on July 14 over Chamery by Unteroffizier Carl Emil Gräper of Jasta 50. Among the captured was Alan Winslow of the 94th, who received a bullet through his left elbow while battling a Fokker and had the arm amputated in a German hospital.

By July 25 the last German push had failed and the Allies were going on the offensive. That was also the day the 95th Aero Squadron’s newly acquired Spad XIIIs made their combat debut. First Lieutenant Grover Vann was killed, but the 95th’s three claims included Leutenant Karl Menckhoff, commander of Royal Saxon Jasta 72 and a holder of the Orden Pour le Mérite with 39 victories. Taken prisoner, Menckhoff was much chagrined to learn that 1st Lt. Walter L. Avery had brought him down in his first air-to-air combat.

On August 1 the 27th sent up 12 Spads and six Nieuports, but took a beating at the hands of the Flying Circus, including at least two Spad pilots, 1st Lts. Oliver T. Beauchamp and Charles B. Sands, among the three dead. Four others were taken prisoner.

Even while the Nieuports fought their last fight, the Americans had remedied their technical problems and wanted to order another 600 with American-made Marlin machine guns in place of the Vickers. By then, however, Spad XIIIs were available and the U.S. cancelled the order. But transitioning to the Spads meant relearning combat tactics to fit the new airplanes, and some of the pilots in the 1st Pursuit Group were unhappy about that. On July 24, 1st Lt. Wilbert W. White of the 147th Aero wrote in his log: “Trial hop in Spad #9589. Give me my Nieuport!” Rickenbacker, who became America’s top-scoring ace of the war, transitioned well to the new airplane. He made his first six kills with the Nieuport but notched his final 20 in the Spad.

The Spad XIII proved to be a greater headache to its mechanics than it

NIEUPORT 28.C1 STATISTICS

ENGINE

WINGSPAN 26 feet 11 inches

WING AREA 170 square feet

LENGTH 22 feet 4 inches

HEIGHT 8 feet 2 inches

EMPTY WEIGHT 1,172 lbs.

GROSS WEIGHT 1,625 lbs.

MAXIMUM SPEED 123 mph

ENDURANCE 1.5 hours

was to its pilots. With nine contractors scrambling to provide the fighters for the French, British, Italians and Americans as fast as possible, their quality was inconsistent to say the least. Of 14 Spads delivered to the 1st Pursuit Group on July 13, only one was listed as flyable the next day. The 94th Aero Squadron alone reported 124 cases of leaking oil pipes and problems with oil pumps, carburetors, magnetos, gas tanks, gauges, reduction gears and other parts between July 18 and 31.

“Our mechanics dug into their job with fine

spirit,” wrote the 1st Pursuit’s commander, Major Harold Hartney. “Although it meant four days for a complete overhaul of the new watercooled engine against four hours on the air-cooled Monosoupape, they realized the additional risks being taken by the pilots and accepted the situation with good grace.”

Thanks largely to a postwar career in Hollywood films, six original Nieuport 28s have survived—two of them in Switzerland, which used 15 as fighter trainers until 1930—but only the Collings Foundation Nieuport that Mikael Carlson restored still flies. “Sure, it flies as well as anything else from this era—or rather, it flies just as badly as anything else,” Carlson said after logging his first flights. “It’s OK, but it is extremely heavy on the ailerons; it’s rock-solid. If you were to fly it at maximum speed, you’d have to use both hands to be able to roll it.

“It feels safe in flight, the only thing is that it runs on full throttle all the time. So, it’s always pushing. When you throttle up for take-off everything happens in an instant—it just goes ‘bam!’ The tail comes up in the blink of an eye and you are airborne after 50 to 70 meters. I don’t pull it up. I will let it leave the ground by itself. I’d rather roll for a few meters extra just to make sure to keep the speed up.”

By June Carlson had logged five flying hours in the Nieuport, each flight recreating the look, sound and smell of a lost aviation era, a time when American pilots needed French technology to join the war in the air. After its flight tests, the airplane was packed up and shipped to the American Heritage Museum in Massachusetts—traveling in the opposite direction from the Americans who had cut their teeth on Nieuports more than a century earlier.

Jon Guttman is the senior editor for Military History and Wild West magazines. For further reading he recommends his own Nieuport 28 , from which this article was adapted, and USAS 1st Pursuit Group

It was just after 7 p.m. local time on August 15, 1935, a frigid day of patchy fog on the far northwest coast of Alaska. Famed flier Wiley Post and his good friend and fellow Oklahoman, the celebrated humorist Will Rogers, were sloshing around the shallow waters of Walakpa Lagoon on the Chukchi Sea coast some 15 miles southwest of Point Barrow. Tiny, remote Barrow, on the most northwesterly point of the North American continent, was to be the jumping off place for their planned flight to Siberia and beyond. They were behind schedule and anxious to get started. Because of poor visibility, Post had gotten lost on the six-hour jump from Fairbanks to Barrow and had been forced to put the floatplane down in the lagoon to get his bearings. The pair had landed near an Inuit family headed by Clare Okpeaha, who had closed his summer seal hunting camp and was waiting for a boat to Barrow. After Rogers explained they were lost, the Inuit, despite his broken English, pointed to the northeast and guessed the town was about “twenty or thirty miles” away—his concept of “English miles” was limited at best.

Post was loathe to lose another day waiting for better visibility, the marginal takeoff minimums be damned. He had come to think of himself as a master of any situation and his assuredness must have swept Rogers into the moment. After a half-hearted attempt by Okpeaha to dissuade the men from attempting to take off in such poor weather, Post and Rogers climbed back into their single-engine Lockheed Orion. Post started the engine and taxied the awkward, nose-heavy machine across the lagoon and positioned it nose-to-wind. Following a hurried engine run-up check, Post throttled up the 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine and lifted off in such an abrupt, steep manner that even Rogers must have been startled. With that last bit of recklessness, Wiley Post condemned them both to a trip into eternity.

Wiley Post is arguably the most unlikely of all the great aviation pioneers. He was a poverty-stricken, one-eyed ex-convict from Oklahoma who never finished junior high school but nevertheless went on to become a parachute jumper in a flying circus, a test pilot, discoverer of the jet stream, inventor of the pressurized flight suit, pioneer of the first autopilot and the first man to fly solo around the world.

Post was born November 22, 1898, in a modest farmhouse near Grand Saline, Texas, though Oklahoma, where he moved as a child, later claimed him as a “favorite son,” as it did Will Rogers. He quit school at 11, having decided he was “old enough to decide matters for himself.” He saw his first airplane at a county fair at age 14, when a Curtiss Pusher was the hit of an airshow. To top off the day, on the trip home Wiley rode in an automobile for the first time. Armed with his new-found love for machines, he took a seven-month auto mechanic’s course, graduating as a chauffeur and mechanic.

Post attended the U.S. Army’s radio school during World War I and went to France but saw no action. After his discharge, he drifted, winding up as an Oklahoma oil field roughneck, leading to his own unsuccessful attempt at becoming an “oil baron.” Unemployed, discouraged, but still fiercely ambitious, Post succumbed to desperate financial temptation and began hijacking

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How did a man with such a checkered past and almost nonexistent formal education make his astounding engineering accomplishments?

Oklahoma. On April 2, 1921, the weekly Chickasha Star newspaper’s headline read, “Bandit Captured and Lodged in Jail.” Wiley was convicted of robbery and sentenced to ten years in the state reformatory. For reasons unclear, however, a sympathetic prison physician came to Wiley’s defense, and Post received parole on June 3, 1922.

Relieved, Post decided it was time he finally made good. He joined the Texas Topnotch Fliers, a flying circus, and became their star parachute jumper for $200 a jump. During this period, he gained a reputation as an utterly fearless aviator. But the work was intermittent; by 1926 he was back on an oil rig. Fate intervened when a roughneck’s sledgehammer sent an iron bolt into his left eye, which had to be removed. He used the settlement money he received to buy an airplane, but struggled mightily to gain his pilot license, no small feat with such a disability. Finally, after accumulating 700 hard-earned probationary flying hours, Wiley Post was awarded air transportation license number 3259 on September 16, 1928. When Texas oilman Florence C. Hall met Post, he was impressed enough by his ability to hire him as his pilot. After that, flush with a new confidence coming from the association with Hall, Post began seeking the main chance.

Now began his incredible breakthrough into

Will Rogers was a beloved entertainer from stage, screen, radio and newspapers. The native Oklahoman was famous for once saying he never met a man he didn’t like.

the national consciousness. Part of his motivation no doubt had to do with a desire to impress his new bride, 17-yearold Mae Laine, with whom he eloped in 1927, but most had to do with his own burning ambition. The opportunity he had been seeking presented itself in late 1928 when Hall sent Post to the Lockheed factory in Los Angeles to exchange his company’s Travel Air for a new Lockheed Vega. Hall named the sleek ship Winnie Mae after his daughter. Post was overjoyed, as it was an airplane designed to “go places and see things.” The coincidence of the name echoing his new wife’s must have been equally gratifying. Unfortunately, that joy was short-lived. A downturn in the oil business forced Hall to give up the luxury of a private airplane and pilot and he sold the Winnie Mae back to Lockheed. Post received a break when Lockheed unexpectedly hired him as a test pilot. In June 1930, Hall re-hired Post and asked him to order a new Winnie Mae Vega, a seven-passenger monoplane with a 420-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Hall also approved Post’s entry into a 1,760-mile National Air Races Derby between Los Angeles and Chicago. Flying with famed navigator Harold Gatty, Post won the race—his first brush with national fame.

That was all it took for the always ambitious Wiley Post to up his game. Boldly, he announced plans to fly around the world in record time. Hall was in favor of the plan; the Depression had slowed his business, Post had plenty of time on his hands and the publicity couldn’t hurt. During the spring and summer of 1931, Gatty mapped out the journey while Post got his machine in tip-top shape. He made many modifications, especially the addition of extra fuel tanks and a special folding hatch atop the fuselage to enable Gatty to make critical celestial observations. The two men departed Roosevelt Field, New York, on June 23, 1931. After a series of incredible adventures, any one of which could have stopped them dead in their tracks, the duo arrived safely back at Roosevelt Field after eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes—a new world record.

In less than three years, Wiley Post had been transformed from an unknown barnstormer into the world’s most famous pilot. And writing the foreword to Post and Gatty’s book about their flight was the world’s most famous humorist, Will Rogers, a “cowboy philosopher” who had become a beloved star of stage, screen and radio as well as a widely read newspaper columnist. Post and Rogers had met in 1925 and they had bonded almost instantly.

In 1932, subject to bouts of melancholia and worried he was sinking from public view—his one real avenue to financial success—Post settled on the idea of flying solo around the world. Incredibly, he somehow pulled that effort together, telling the newspapers in February 1933 he would do it with help from a new “robot” or “automatic pilot.” Post had a Sperry autopilot installed in the Winnie Mae and dubbed the new contrivance “Mechanical Mike.” He received permission to use this “risky” device on condition he not carry passengers, which of course was the whole idea. After modifications that included increasing the Winnie Mae ’s fuel capacity, beefing up the range on his two-way radio mast and installing a more reliable ignition harness, Post was ready.

Early in the morning of July 15, 1933, Post took off from New York’s Floyd Bennett Field. He was wearing a white eye patch after having suf-

fered severe headaches when his glass eye froze over Siberia two years earlier. His last words to his wife were a rather grim, “See you in six days or else.” Fortunately, the “or else” never materialized, though he didn’t make the six-day goal. Once again, Post’s combination of skill and luck held. Other highly capable aerial competitors were hot on his heels, but the “one-eyed superman” arrived triumphant back in New York on the evening of July 22, 1933. He had broken his own speed record by more than 21 hours—a total of seven days, 18 hours and 49.5 minutes.

The nation could not seem to do enough to express its delight in Wiley Post’s feat. The honors, awards and accolades continued for months; even President Franklin Roosevelt personally thanked him for his “courage and stamina.” New York mayor John P. O’Brien pinned a new gold medal on Post’s coat and compared him to globe-girdling explorers Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. Still, Post’s dream of great wealth remained elusive and, while he did make decent money endorsing such products as Camel cigarettes, it was not enough; he hungered for new ways to win acclaim. In particular, his use of the Sperry autopilot on the solo world flight had whetted his appetite for state-of-theart scientific investigations.

He turned his attention to testing the “thin air”—the unexplored stratosphere, beginning around 30,000 feet. An opportunity came with the announcement of the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia, with a firstplace prize of £15,000. Post intuitively understood his only chance to win the 12,500-mile challenge was to take advantage of the high-alti-

tude winds that had recently been discovered by stratospheric balloon flights. It was clear the plywood-built Winnie Mae could not be pressurized; Post would need something like a deep-sea diver’s suit to protect him. With the help of the B.F. Goodrich Co., he developed a pressurized flight ensemble, dubbed at the time, “a man from Mars” suit. It was constructed from a rubberized parachute material, including a plastic vision plate encased in an aluminum helmet. After getting mixed results from the tests of several suits, Post reached 40,000 feet on September 5, 1934. He was the first person to fly in a pressure suit, as well as the first to use liquid oxygen for breathing. Post had proved operating in the stratosphere was “a definite reality, with practical equipment.”

By this time, Post’s adventures and headlines about his proposed stratospheric dashes across the continent were galvanizing the public, subsuming his push to enter the MacRobertson Race. Additionally, to Post’s delight, Will Rogers had renewed their friendship, having become increasingly interested in his activities. As it happened, Rogers had been present when a pressure suit-equipped Post attempted a high-altitude, 375-mph flight from Burbank to New York on February 22, 1935. Post had to make a forced landing shortly after takeoff, with engine sabotage strongly suspected— Post was picking up jealous competitors along with his growing commercial endorsements. Rogers wrote: “[Saw] Wiley Post take off.… He soon had to land. He brought her down on her stomach [the gear had been dropped on takeoff

Top: Post and Rogers prepare to board the Lockheed during the Alaska expedition. Rogers would often type his newspaper column during flights. Above: Post makes an adjustment to the airplane’s engine. The craft was a combination of an Orion fuselage and an Explorer wing that sat atop pontoons.

for streamlining], that guy don’t need wheels.”

After a failed second attempt at the transcontinental speed record on April 14, Rogers suggested the aging Winnie Mae be retired and Post given tangible help in his scientific pursuits: “Wiley Post…cant break records getting to New York in a six-year-old plane, no matter if he takes it up so high that he coasts in.… So when Wiley gets ready to put her in the Smithsonian we all want to give him a hand.” The appeal worked, Congress appropriated $25,000 for the museum’s purchase, but the money went to Hall, the airplane’s owner. Meanwhile, the impulsive and always resourceful Post had somehow pulled together the necessary additional financing to purchase a new airplane.

Post did not give his new airplane a name, but

experienced pilots and mechanics had taken one look at this one-of-a-kind “unusual-looking” plane and dubbed it “Wiley’s Orphan,” or alluding to its rather illegitimate origin, “Wiley’s Bastard.” Painted “Waco Red” with silver trim, it had a second-hand Lockheed Orion 9-E Special fuselage married to an orphan Lockheed Explorer wing and a 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Its retractable gear could fit into the low Lockheed wing, but the airplane could also be fitted with pontoons. The design’s chief advantages were greater speed and a high load capability. The chief disadvantage, by far, was a too-far-forward center of gravity, causing nose heaviness and a built-in tendency to assume a diving attitude. With pontoons attached, the problem was exacerbated. A Lockheed engineer had even warned Post, “you’ll be in trouble if there is just a slight power loss on takeoff.” Increasingly overconfident, even complacent, Post ignored him, keeping the plane’s imbalance a secret when applying for an air worthiness certificate on July 23, 1935.

A hint of what Post planned to do with his new machine emerged when a reporter apparently overheard a conversation and wrote a story that Will Rogers and Wiley Post were secretly planning a trip to Siberia via Alaska. It rang true to many; Rogers had long expressed a desire to visit the Far North. In addition, Post had obtained financing to survey potential air routes from Alaska to Russia.

Meanwhile, Will Rogers was at his ranch in Pacific Palisades, California, dithering over whether to commit to this Alaskan “vacation,” as he called it. His wife, Betty, opposed the trip out of fear the men would get lost over the trackless Siberian wastes. Will calmed her with assurances that he was only committing to visiting Alaska. Probably, he said, he would say goodbye to Post there and return home. Betty could see how badly her husband wanted to go, so she acquiesced.

The two men kept a public silence about their proposed venture as Rogers put the finishing touches on his last movie, Steamboat Round the Bend. By August 4, the secret was out; national headlines announced that beloved humorist and movie star Will Rogers would fly to Alaska with Wiley Post. Their journey began with a takeoff from Seattle’s Lake Washington, adjacent to Boeing Field, on Wednesday morning, August 7, 1935. Post and Rogers landed on Juneau’s Gastineau Channel a thousand miles and eightand-a-quarter hours later. There an old friend of Post’s, famed Alaska pilot Joe Crosson, greeted

them. A Juneau newspaper noted the reaction of the local bush pilots, “[who shook] their heads in doubt…at the plane.” Rogers was the soul of hospitality when asked about their plans. “Wiley and I are like a couple of country boys in an old Ford—don’t know where we’re going and don’t care,” he said. Post, however, was irritable, snapping at reporters, “We’re going to stay [in Juneau] until we get ready to takeoff!”

When weather finally allowed the journey to continue, a local air line mechanic observed, “Post was not a good seaplane pilot…too abrupt on takeoff and pulled up too steep.” Following goodwill stops at Dawson, Aklavik and Anchorage, the two tourists departed Fairbanks on August 15, bound for Point Barrow. Post con tinued to exhibit erratic flying behavior, espe cially regarding fuel management and danger ous scud running—all of which Rogers under stood nothing. Or cared; he was loving every minute of his time in Alaska.

luck that he’d made it as far as Walakpa Lagoon. After a hurried conversation with the Okpeahas, Post and Rogers got back into the red Orion and took off into the fog and mist, with Post once

ALASKA

On the takeoff from Fairbanks, Post had made another dangerously steep departure. One bush pilot noted that “if the engine [had] quit, he’s a goner.” The weather was forecast bad all the way, but Post forgot his pledge not to fly Rogers “in or above cloud or fog bank.” He was now “making his own weather.” In fact, it was only due to his great skill and continued good

Following a steep ascent, the airplane’s engine quit and the Lockheed landed upside down in the Walakpa Lagoon about 15 miles from Point Barrow. Post and Rogers died instantly in the crash.

In “Mid-air Capture of Discoverer 14 Satellite,” artist Ren Wicks depicts a C-119J of the 6593rd Test Squadron (Special) as it makes the first-ever aerial recovery of an object from space. On August 19, 1960, the airplane snagged a capsule containing top-secret satellite photos taken from orbit over the Soviet Union. Inset: The Air Force approved the squadron’s emblem on July 14, 1961.

The briefing took place at 7:00 a.m., and two hours later a Fairchild C-119J Flying Boxcar with the call sign Pelican 9 lifted off from Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. It was August 19, 1960, and Pelican 9 was on its way to make a historic rendezvous.

Piloting the twin-engine cargo airplane was Captain Harold Mitchell. In World War II Mitchell had served as a bombardier and gunner on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and later flew transports for the Berlin Air Lift. During the Korean War, Mitchell flew C-119s and Douglas C-47s on combat drops of airborne troops at the Chosin Reservoir, as well as resupply, medevac and logistics missions.

Pelican 9’s copilot was Captain Richmond Apaka, who had graduated from the University of Hawaii before joining the Air Force. Also onboard were a winch operator, four loadmasters (two on each side of the fuselage), a photographer, navigator and flight engineer. They belonged to Test Squadron 6593 (Special), under the direction of the 6594th Test Group.

Pelican 9 flew to its assigned patrol area over the Pacific Ocean 300

Top: Captain Harold Mitchell (front left) and the crew of Pelican 9 enjoy a photo opportunity in front of their aircraft. Above: Air Force illustrations show how the C-119 crew accomplished the feat of snagging a satellite capsule from the air.

miles southwest of Hickam. Shortly before 1:00 p.m., a capsule separated from a satellite in orbit high above. Before long Pelican 9 detected a signal from a descending object about 4,000 feet overhead, and then the crew spotted an orange and silver parachute. Dangling beneath it was a gold capsule—“the shape and size of a kettle drum gleaming in the sun,” as Mitchell described it. Mitchell slowed the aircraft to 120 knots and made a first pass as his boom operators tried to snag the target. They narrowly

Mitchell, here at the controls of a C-119 in 1959, had gained experience with aerial recovery missions during Project Genetrix (sidebar, right), when he captured camera-toting balloons.

missed the capsule on the first two attempts, but the third time proved the charm, and the crew captured the parachute and its capsule at 8,500 feet. Chief pole operator SSgt. Algaene Harmon got on the intercom. “Good hit, Captain, we’ve got her in tow,” he said. The crew reeled in the metal canister, which was still black with soot from the retrorockets. Once they had it on board, they locked the capsule and its classified payload into a canister and turned back to Hickam.

Pelican 9 had made the first aerial capture of an object from space. The capsule contained photographs of the Soviet Union taken by a spy satellite of Project Corona, a top-secret and high priority program for the American defense establishment. Corona combined what was then state-of-the-art satellite technology with a decidedly lower-tech recovery process—a propellor-driven cargo airplane using hooks to snatch the capsule out of the air.

The C-119 Flying Boxcar that recovered the photos traced its origins to Sherman Fairchild (1896-1971), an aviation innovator, entrepreneur and 1979 inductee into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. One of his ventures was the Fairchild Aviation Corporation, the aerospace concern that built the twin-engine C-82 Packet, designed to replace cargo aircraft such as the Douglas C-47.

Fairchild Aviation later developed the C-119 as an improved version of the C-82. First flown

Balloon Spies

The program went by various names, among them Grandson, Gopher and Genetrix. By any name it was a wild and crazy scheme— but maybe just crazy enough to work. Approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in December 1955 and run jointly by the Central Intelligence Agency, Air Force and Navy, the program sought to uncover secrets behind the Iron Curtain by sending hundreds of camera-equipped balloons floating across the Soviet Union.

The polyethylene balloons, constructed by a division of the General Mills company, were designed to float at up to 85,000 feet and carried cameras in gondolas the size of refrigerators. The gondolas rotated to give the cameras maximum coverage during missions that could last up to two weeks.

The first nine balloons were launched from Turkey and West Germany on January 10, 1956, and took advantage of prevailing winds to float eastward across the Soviet Union and out over the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds more followed. The idea was that once these helium-filled spies had floated out of Soviet airspace, crewmembers of specially equipped Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcars would zero in on their homing signals and snag the gondolas in mid-air—the same kind of recovery technique later used to retrieve payloads from the first Corona spy satellites.

C-119s did recover a few gondolas, but not many. One source says only 45 out of 516, with only 32 of them producing usable photographs. The Soviet Union was predictably outraged by the violation of its airspace. The Russians put gondolas they had recovered on display in Moscow and sent angry diplomatic notes to the United States. The U.S. merely claimed that the intruders were innocent weather balloons—much as it later claimed the U-2 spy plane was conducting weather research.

Project Genetrix had limited success, with Eisenhower deciding that “the balloons gave more legitimate grounds for irritation than could be matched by the good obtained by them.” One Genetrix balloon did contribute to the U.S. intelligence effort, though. The images it obtained showed construction of a mysterious facility in Siberia near Dodonovo. Analysts realized the complex was a factory for nuclear refining.

The Air Force tried a similar eyes-in-the-skies effort in 1958 with an improved balloon called the WS-461L. Launched from an aircraft carrier in the Bering Sea, the balloons floated up to 110,000 feet to take advantage of a seasonal reversal of the jet stream and float west across the Soviet Union. The gondolas were set to jettison automatically from the balloon after 400 hours in the air, but no one thought to reset the timers after the launches were delayed. That meant the gondolas plunged to earth while still over the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets were not happy; neither was Eisenhower. —Tom Huntington

in 1947, the C-119 had two 18-cylinder Wright Cyclone 3350 engines, similar to those used on aircraft such as the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The C-119 had a wingspan of 109 feet and was 87 feet long. Early model C-119s had a “clamshell” tail design that opened outward at the aircraft’s rear between and below its twin booms; the later C-119Js had a “beaver tail” that lifted out from the fuselage, an ideal feature for retrieving satellites. As its name attests, the Flying Boxcar wasn’t glamorous, but it served well in any number of roles in the 1950s, including dropping prefabricated

bridge sections to Marines fighting in North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir; transporting French paratroopers and delivering supplies to French troops at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam; and carrying materials to build the Distant Early Warning line across Alaska and Canada. By the time production ended in 1955, almost 1,200 C-119s had been built.

Boxcar pilot and historian Wendell Cosner noted that the airplane had drawbacks. For one thing, the amount of cockpit glass could create greenhouse conditions on warm days. Cosner also said the C-119 was “damn heavy” on the controls, since there were no power boosts for the control surfaces. Other pilots disparaged the C-119 as “thousands of rivets flying in loose formation” and listed numerous mechanical problems, but maintenance crews worked long and hard to keep the aircraft flying. Pelican 9’s Mitchell thought his C-119J, No. 18037, eventually became “an excellent airplane,” but admitted it was “a junk heap” when he first started flying it. “I think I had something like 30 write-ups on it, hydraulic and gas leaks,” he said.

As the Cold War escalated after World War II, U.S. intelligence agencies struggled to learn the true extent of Soviet military capabilities. In 1949 the Soviets detonated a nuclear device, sending shock waves through the U.S. military and political leadership and increasing demands for better ways to monitor the nation’s main adversary. The demands became more insistent after the Soviets began attacking American reconnaissance airplanes that neared their borders, shooting down several.

Project Genetrix, a program approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955, explored one method of monitoring the Soviet Union

from above—with camera-equipped balloons (see sidebar, previous page). Throughout the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military searched for other ways to determine the number and location of Soviet aircraft and missiles. The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation had already started contemplating the use of orbiting satellites for photographic espionage; in 1946 RAND had even issued a report called “Preliminary Design for a World-Circling Spaceship.” That vision came closer to reality in October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. The Soviet success increased the urgency for intelligence gathering.

Created in 1958, the CIA-led Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) received responsibility for conducting military-related space projects with Air Force support. One goal was to develop a reconnaissance satellite that could photograph the Soviet Union and other Communist countries from space, and then return the film to earth in a capsule (since the technology to download image data did not yet exist). This provided the essence of Project Corona. Approved by Eisenhower in 1958, the program had public and secret faces. For public consumption, the satellites were called Discoverer and their cover story was that they would study conditions outside the atmosphere and develop new spaceflight technologies, including recovery techniques. The real goals of

the program remained secret.

James Plummer of Lockheed’s Missile and Space Division became Corona’s program manager. Plummer modeled his team after the Skunk Works, Lockheed Aircraft’s research and development arm that had developed the U-2 spy plane, among many other aircraft. Lockheed would build the orbiting space vehicle. Other major contractors were General Electric (recovery vehicle), Eastman Kodak (film), Fairchild Camera and Instrument (another company founded by Sherman Fairchild, for cameras), and All American Engineering (recovery equipment and classroom training on aerial recovery techniques).

Corona’s many challenges included developing cameras that could function in the vacuum and extreme conditions of space, 100 miles or more above the earth’s surface. Each camera required a three-axis stabilizing system to take clear images even as the satellite was moving at 16,000 mph around a rotating earth. Imaging resolution, the ground size equivalent of the smallest visible view, was originally about 25 feet, but improved over time to six feet. A successful mission would conclude with a capsule physically returning exposed film to earth while protecting the top-secret cargo from the extreme temperatures of reentry.

Corona missions began lifting off from California’s Vandenberg AFB beginning in February 1959. The first 12 failed, either through launch pad misfires, failure to achieve orbit or poor camera operation. A lack of telemetry data made troubleshooting difficult. Parachutes created their own difficulties, as early versions proved unstable and had a too-fast descent rate. Corona and Lockheed engineers redesigned the parachutes, reducing the sink rate from 33 to 20 feet per second.

CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell met with a frustrated Eisenhower to explain what may have caused the failures. Some in the CIA and the Defense Department wanted to cancel the project, but the president remained committed. Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 spyplane had been shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, and Eisenhower wanted to avoid another incident. Satellites also had the potential to survey much more of the Soviet Union than the U-2 could, another factor that likely motivated the president’s ongoing support for Corona.

Through the perseverance of the project team, Corona began to turn around. In August 1960, Discoverer 13’s capsule was successfully retrieved from the Pacific Ocean’s surface. The mission was a test flight that did not include cameras, but the achievement was still significant as the first time an object flown into space had been recovered. However, Mitchell and his crew in the retrieval C-119 had not been able to intercept the capsule before it hit the water.

Discoverer 14 was launched from Vandenberg aboard a Thor-Agena A launch vehicle on August 18, 1960. The second-stage Agena vehicle separated from the booster as planned and reached orbit. Over the course of 17 circuits around the planet, the Corona camera operated perfectly, taking 3,000 feet of film that covered 1,650,000 square miles of Soviet territory. The only thing remaining was to get the exposed film back to earth and into the hands of intelligence analysts.

Corona’s planners had decided to use the C-119Js that had proven their worth on Project Genetrix, although making the rendezvous remained challenging. The satellites dropped their capsules from an orbit of 550,000 feet or higher. After the capsule entered the atmosphere, the parachute separated from its heat shield and a drogue chute

Top: The first image taken by Discoverer 14 photographed the Mys Shmidta airfield in the Soviet Union. The long white object in the center of the image is the runway and the smaller object is the field’s apron. Above: Housed in an Agena second stage and launched by a Thor booster, the satellite’s cameras had to function in the cold and vacuum of space. The portion that was recovered is at the top. It took 14 launch attempts before the first images were successfully returned to Earth.

After Discoverer 14’s success, the Pelican 9 crew embarked on a publicity tour, with the satellite’s spy mission masked by a cover story that it was only conducting scientific research. Here crewmember Daniel Hill points out details of the capsule to some local luminaries.

deployed, followed by the main chute at about 60,000 feet. Ideally, the C-119 would be in position to capture the capsule and film between 12,000 and 15,000 feet over the ocean.

Once airborne, crews worked relentlessly, dealing with the slipstream, engine noise and recovery gear, often at altitudes over 10,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft. Crewmen could use oxygen hoses on the side of the cargo compartment. For safety, crew working at the aircraft’s rear wore parachutes and inflatable life jackets and could use a D-ring on their parachutes to hook themselves to a metal cable. Knives were available to cut the capsule’s parachute risers if they became entangled.

Aircraft such as RC-121Ds (a military variant of the Lockheed Constellation) served as aerial command posts. These aircraft had homing equipment to help the retrieval aircraft locate the parachute. Once the C-119 had a visual, the pilot would fly past the capsule—which was falling at about 1,500 to 2,000 feet per minute—circle back and time his flight path with the descending parachute’s trajectory. Ideally, at capture the parachute’s top would be about six feet below the aircraft. The recovery equipment included hydraulically operated actuators that raised and lowered two 34-foot poles, a recovery line with eight hooks to catch the parachute, and a winch to pull the capsule to the aircraft. A trough held nylon lines that were deployed for the recovery. A “guillotine” could fire a pyrotechnic charge to cut the lines in an emergency.

Loadmasters in the aircraft’s rear waited for visual sighting of the parachute canopy and listened for the noise of impact and payout of line from the cable trough. Once winched aboard, capsules were often still warm to the touch from the heat of reentry.

As a backup, Navy ships patrolled the expected landing area, with helicopters and divers ready if the aircraft failed to catch the capsule. In the event of a water landing, capsules could float for several days before a saltwater plug dissolved, sinking the container and ending the risk of a Soviet pickup.

Few personnel on Corona recovery missions knew the exact nature of the recovered payload; information was shared on a need-to-know basis. Navigators came mainly from Military Airlift Command with extensive over-water navigation experience. Some enlisted men, such as Airman 2nd Class Daniel Hill of Pelican 9, were assigned to Corona because they had experience with Genetrix.

“To see a live Discoverer payload from space descending towards you on a brilliant parachute was every aircrew’s dream from day one,” Hill said later. Pilot Mitchell had also cut his teeth with Project Genetrix.

After Pelican 9 made its successful recovery of the Discoverer 14 capsule, Mitchell felt “vindicated” after the unsuccessful attempt to snare Discoverer 13. He descended from the flight deck to shake hands with the crew and congratulate them on their work. Winch operator Tech. Sgt. Louis Bannick handed Mitchell a piece he had torn from the parachute. “For you, captain,” he said. “They will never miss it.” Once back at Hickam, the film went to Eastman Kodak for processing and then the images were sent to intelligence agencies, where photo interpreters were “jubilant” and pronounced the photos “stupendous.” Mitchell received the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission; the others on Pelican 9 received the Air Medal. In addition, the 6593rd Squadron won the 1960 Mackay Trophy as a Unit Award.

The mission, with the science cover story intact, received plentiful media coverage. In one interview, Mitchell modestly described flying the missions as “easy,” but enlisted personnel such as Sgts. Charles Dorigan and Richard Bell thought otherwise, noting the precise flying

skills required to reach the capsule without hitting it. Mitchell, 1st Lt. Robert Counts and Bannick traveled to New York City to tape an interview with Dave Garroway for the “Today Show.” All airmen were invited to a formal dinner in Washington, D.C., hosted by Lt. Gen. Bernard Schriever of the Air Research and Development Command.

The C-119s were not around to share the limelight. No matter how well maintained, the twin-engine C-119Js were not ideal for over-water operations, and the military opted to phase them out in favor of Lockheed’s four-engine JC-130 Hercules. The Hercules started flying Corona missions in June 1961, using the same basic catch and retrieval process, although with upgraded recovery systems and electronics.

The satellite programs remained a huge boost to the U.S. intelligence community, with 153 film canisters retrieved between 1960 and May 1972. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked, “Because of satellites, I know how many missiles the enemy has, and I can sleep comfortably at night.”

The program concluded in 1972 when the military introduced other airborne surveillance programs such as “Hexagon” and “Gambit.”

After President Bill Clinton declassified Corona in 1995, records indicated that the program took about 800,000 photos. Air Force magazine commented that program photos showed “all of the Soviet missile complexes, each class of Soviet submarine, a complete inventory of fighters and bombers, the presence of Soviet missiles in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, Soviet nuclear assistance in China, antiballistic missile defense inside the Soviet Union, atomic weapons storage sites, Chinese missile complexes, air

defense batteries, surface ship fleets, command-and-control facilities, and the Plesetsk Missile Test Range north of Moscow.” Corona missions also surveilled and captured films of Communist China’s preparations for its first nuclear test in 1964 and North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites during the Vietnam War. In a paper for Studies in Intelligence , Kenneth Greer noted that “the totality of Corona’s contributions to U.S. intelligence holdings on denied areas and to the U.S. space program in general is virtually unmeasurable.”

Mitchell flew 117 missions in Vietnam and retired in 1974 as a lieutenant colonel. His C-119J and parts of the Discoverer 14 capsule are at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton, Ohio.

Barry Levine works at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, volunteers at the Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan, and writes on a variety of aviation and history topics. For further reading he suggests The History of the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar by Wendell Cosner and The Gunship Chronicles: Stinger 41 , by Larry Barbee.

“SEND THE EGGBEATER TO TARO”

THE ONLY WAY TO RESCUE SOLDIERS FROM THE BURMESE JUNGLE DURING WORLD WAR II INVOLVED SOMETHING CALLED A HELICOPTER

Second Lieutenant Carter Harman was grounded, nursing a cold, and leafing through a Life magazine. It was 1943 and the Brooklyn-born Princeton graduate, an aspiring musician and composer, was serving as a flying instructor at Perrin Air Force Base in Texas while waiting to be shipped overseas. An officer approached the rail-thin Harman and several other young pilots. He asked if there was anyone who weighed less than 150 pounds who would volunteer to fly “heel-e-o-copters.”

“I had heard about them, but I knew nothing about helicopters,” Harman said years later. “I asked around and someone told me that even though you should never volunteer for anything in the Army, it was a good idea to get into every kind of aircraft I could. So, I volunteered.”

Carter Harman, pictured here in his Sikorsky YR-4B, used the still-unproven helicopter for a rescue mission in Burma. Success required daring, improvisation and not a little luck.

Just six months later, Harman was above the jungles of Burma (now Myanmar) flying the first military helicopter rescue mission with an underpowered Sikorsky YR-4B that was prone to stalling in the hot and humid climate. Below him, hiding from the Japanese in the thick jungle canopy, was an American pilot, Ed “Murphy” Hladovcak, who had been shot down while ferrying three wounded and sick British soldiers in a Stinson L-1 Vigilant light aircraft. Enemy patrols passed so close to the four men that, “we could have reached out and touched them,” said Hladovcak, whom everyone called Murphy because his last name was hard to pronounce.

The origins of Harman’s mission can be traced back to the 1943 Quebec Conference of Allied leaders, which adopted a bold plan (eventually called

Project 9 or Operation Thursday) to establish airbases deep within enemy territory in Burma to support the British Special Forces of Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate—the Chindits—who were operating behind enemy lines. The Americans would provide the air support for the operation, and General Harold H. “Hap” Arnold selected Lt. Col. Philip Cochran and Lt. Col. John Alison to lead the newly formed 1st Air Commando Group to operate the bases. Cochran was a friend of well-known cartoonist Milton Caniff and served as the inspiration for Flip Corkin, a flight instructor in Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates comic strip. He had just returned from service in North Africa when he received his assignment. Alison was back in the U.S. after flying P-40s in China when he received his orders.

While Cochran and Alison were planning Project 9, Harman spent the last few months of 1943 at Sikorsky’s plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he and several other volunteers learned how to fly helicopters. At the time, the new invention was untested on the battlefield. Igor Sikorsky’s VS-300, considered by many to be the world’s first successful helicopter, had initially flown in 1939, and it led to the YR-4A, production of which began in late 1942. The YR-4B that Harman would fly was an improved version with a 200-horsepower engine, about 20 more than the YR-4A’s. Under ideal conditions, it had a top speed of around 65 miles per hour and could carry its pilot and a passenger about 120 miles. The jungles of Burma were hardly ideal conditions, and it took Cochran and Alison a long time to convince their superiors to include six of the helicopters on their roster of aircraft.

Harman remembered watching his first helicopter flight at Bridgeport. Charles Lester “Les” Morris, Sikorsky’s famed test pilot, was at the controls. “What have I gotten myself into?” Harman asked himself as he watched the YR-4B take to the air.

He found out a few days later on his first flight, with Sikorsky test pilot Dimitry D. “Jimmy” Viner flying. “I was astonished that we lifted right up and went right over a fence in front of us,” he recalled. “When we came in for a landing, being a fixed-wing pilot, I kept checking the airspeed to make sure we wouldn’t come in too slow and stall or too hot and roll off the end of the runway. The speed went down to 40, 30, 20, 10 and I was terrified. I knew it was supposed to hover before it landed, but you really don’t understand this until you are there.”

Far left: Lt. Col. Philip Cochran (left) and Lt. Col. John Alison served as commander and deputy commander of the 1st Air Commando Group. Left: Cochran also served as the inspiration for the character “Flip” Corkin from Milton Caniff’s comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.”

Learning how to hover was difficult. “You’d go sideways and correct, but overcorrect, and pretty soon you were overcorrecting back and forth,” Harman said. “The instructor would take the stick and stop it and then you’d try it again.”

Harman soon got the hang of hovering, as well as takeoffs and landings. After 2.5 hours of dual flight with a Sikorsky test pilot beside him, he became the seventh Army pilot to solo in a helicopter. He completed his training after 20 hours of solo flight, and then was on his way overseas along with three other helicopter pilots and six dismantled YR-4B helicopters loaded aboard C-46 transports. For two weeks the convoy wound its way from Bridgeport to Miami, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Brazil, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, Egypt and, finally, Lalaghat, India, arriving on March 10, 1944. “Of the six helicopters that took off with us, only four got there,” Harman said. One of the C-46s crashed in a storm and its helicopter was destroyed. Another arrived with a missing tail rotor that was never located.

Five days earlier, on March 5, a fleet of C-47s had left Lalaghat, towing scores of Waco CG-4 Hadrian gliders about 200 miles into Burma to launch Project 9. The gliders, loaded with bulldozers, mules, troops and supplies, landed late at night in a jungle clearing dubbed Broadway. Although most of the gliders were damaged or destroyed, “539 men and almost 30,000 pounds of supplies successfully landed in the clearing,” according to an account by Defense Media Network. The men built a landing strip, and a fleet of North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, P-51 Mustang fighters and Stinson L-1 and L-5 light aircraft set up shop to ferry in additional troops and supplies, provide air cover, fly bombing missions, evacuate wounded soldiers and otherwise support the Chindits.

The operation took the Japanese by surprise, and they didn’t discover the Broadway base for a few days. Once they did, the fighting intensified,

and more and more evacuation flights, in fixedwing aircraft, began using the base.

Back in Lalaghat, the helicopters were put together and a series of test flights began. On one of these test flights, Burt Powell and Pete Tierney were flying a YR-4B when it hit a power line and crashed, killing Powell and seriously injuring Tierney. Bob Beaman, the third helicopter pilot, was shot in the hip while flying a fixed-wing mission. This left Harman as the only healthy YR-4B pilot.

The original plan was to fly the helicopters 200 miles east from Lalaghat to Broadway, but geography and the Japanese made this a challenge. “I had about two hours of fuel at 60 miles per hour,” Harman remembered. “The Japanese held the area so there was no way we could land to refuel.” One alternative was to fly 600 miles north to an Allied airstrip at Taro in northern Burma, refueling at stops along the way, and then fly another 250 miles south, with refueling stops, to another base called Aberdeen. “It was over Japanese territory, and I didn’t want to take a chance, Harman said. “So it looked like we weren’t ever going to have a mission.”

That changed on April 21, 1944, when “Murphy” Hladovcak was evacuating three Chindits from 200 miles behind enemy lines. Two of the soldiers were wounded and the third had malaria. Ground fire hit the fuel line of Hladovcak’s L-1. The American pilot was able to find a small clearing, about 150 feet long, and land beside a Japanese-held road. The men headed off into the jungle and began climbing to the top of a small ridge. It was a difficult climb, made even harder by the injuries and ill-

jungle made an airplane rescue impossible. There was one other option: A helicopter could, in theory, reach the men from Broadway and ferry them out, one-by-one.

Eventually, another pilot flew over and dropped a note. “They said a helicopter was coming to get us,” Hladovcak said later.

“Send the eggbeater to Taro,” was the message Harman received in Lalaghat. From Taro, Harman would fly on to the Broadway base and receive further instructions for the rescue.

Harman and Jimmy Phelan, a Sikorsky mechanic assigned to help maintain the helicopters, began preparing one of the YR-4Bs for the rescue mission. They loaded the cockpit with extra cans of gasoline and strapped a stretcher to one of the skids. “It looked like a coffin,” Harman said. “[The stretcher] was right in the middle of the downwash and as far as flying, it created some drag. I had to counteract it a bit to keep flying straight.”

Flying straight was just one of the many issues Harman had to address. The temperature was above 100 degrees, sometimes reaching 110. This reduced the payload the YR-4B could carry and caused the engine to stall. “We found with some tests that if we got it moving forward, getting more air into the engine, it wouldn’t stall,” Harman said. “Well, the jungle was too dense to do running starts. So, we decided we would jump

via C-46 Commandos and are unloaded by men of the 1st Commando Group. Above: Harmon would have to cover a lot of territory as he flew from India into Burma, with stops at the jungle bases known as Aberdeen and Broadway.

FLYING STRAIGHT WAS JUST ONE OF THE MANY ISSUES HARMAN HAD TO ADDRESS.

start it in the air. We would over rev it, get it up to the red part of the gauge, and then pull the main pitch up very hard and jump into the air. Then, I had to convert to forward flight right away. It was hazardous, but we could lift two people that way.”

Harman first had to fly to a base in Dimapur to refuel, unsure if it was still held by the Allies. “We didn’t know if the Japanese had gotten there, the details were sketchy,” he said, but to his relief, the Allies still held the base. It took Harman and the YR-4B two days to get from there to Taro, where he was told to continue to Broadway. Harman didn’t think he could do it. It was too far to fly without refueling and he didn’t want to land and refuel in Japanese-held territory. He was told to land near Lake Indawgyi and refuel there with the extra gas tanks he was carrying. The briefers said there would be time to refuel before any Japanese troops arrived.

Harman was skeptical. Instead, he and some mechanics used good-old Yankee ingenuity to rig an auxiliary gas tank from a crashed L-1 into the helicopter cockpit, just above the pilot’s head. By the time the tank was in place, it was dark, and Harman had to spend the night in Taro. He was in luck: The Heavenly Body, starring Hedy Lamarr and William Powell, was playing at the base that night.

The final leg to Broadway was over Japanese-held territory where Harman could be spotted from the ground, or possibly by a fighter.

Harman decided to fly at about 1,200 feet, high enough to be above the range of enemy ground fire. “I also figured out what to do, theoretically, if I was attacked by a fighter,” he said. “Since I was able to stop or go slow, and was more maneuverable, I would peel off and head for the jungle and hide in the trees.” Fortunately for Harman, he didn’t encounter ground fire or a Japanese fighter.

After reaching Broadway on April 24, Harman took Cochran up in the helicopter. The engine quit and the pilot had to autorotate to a landing. Nevertheless, the YR-4B impressed Cochran. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that, “Today the ‘egg-beater’ went into action and the damn thing acted like it had good sense.”

In the meantime, Hladovcak—who was about 40 miles away from Broadway—had his hands full caring for the three British soldiers. With limited rations and only a small first aid kit, he put sulfa on the open wounds and cut bandages from the parachute. Soon after Harman reached Broadway, another pilot dropped a note from his airplane to Hladovcak. Head back down the ridge, it said, and find a clearing. The helicopter is coming.

On April 25 Harman first flew to a river that had a sandbar large enough for L-5s to land. From there a pair of L-5s led Harman and the YR-4B to Hladovcak and the three British soldiers. Harman circled until he found a flat, clear spot to land. “I saw Murphy come out of the jungle limping,” Harman said. “He had banged up his knee and elbow carrying this guy down on his back.”

“You look like an angel,” Hladovcak told Harman.

The wounded soldier had a serious back injury, smelled of dry blood and was covered in flies. They loaded him into the helicopter. “I made a jump start and made it back to the sandbar,” Harman said. The wounded man was loaded into an L-5 waiting there.

Harman returned to the clearing, picked up a second British soldier and ferried him to the sandbar. And then the YR-4B’s overheated engine refused to restart. It was getting dark, so Harman and the others at the sandbar decided to wait until the next morning to pick up Hladovcak and the other wounded Chindit.

By this time Japanese soldiers had become aware of the rescue mission and a search party of soldiers began looking for Hladovcak and the remaining British soldier. “We heard them walking all around us,” Hladovcak said. “We didn’t sleep the entire night.”

The next morning, a brief rain shower lowered the temperature, the YR-4B’s engine started back up, and Harman returned to the clearing and picked up the third British soldier, and then returned to bring Hladovcak out. Harman and his eggbeater had completed the mission.

Harman flew a handful of what he called “routine” casualty evacuation missions from the Aberdeen base over the next few weeks. He saw Hladovcak a few times “but we really didn’t know each other,” Harman said, adding that the British soldier with the back injury survived.

With monsoon season approaching, Harman received orders to fly the YR-4B the 600 miles back to Lalaghat, and then ferry the two remaining helicopters—the third one had been destroyed in a crash with Tierney at the controls, but he wasn’t seriously injured—to a base in Asansol, India, northwest of Calcutta. “I had to stop several times in paddy fields to wait out the terrible storms,” Harman said. “The locals always rushed out to see what was going on.” Sometimes as many as 1,000 people crowded in for a look at this strange flying machine. Harman had one engine failure on the ferry flights, the first in-air failure he had experienced in a YR-4B. Fortunately for all concerned, the helicopter was only four or five feet off the ground.

At the base in Asansol, Harman “checked out” a few fixed-wing pilots in an YR-4B. He then got a bad case of dysentery and spent almost a month in the base hospital. By then monsoon season had arrived. “That was the end of the helicopters,” Harman said. “They were stored in Asansol and I was part of a light-plane squadron,” adding that, “so far as I know, the two remaining YR-4Bs were abandoned in India.”

In the decades after the war, Hladovcak became a civilian flight instructor and a licensed helicopter pilot. The Nebraska native was involved in airport operations, operated Antelope Flying Service and ran a tavern.

Harman was discharged in August 1945 with the rank of captain and returned to New York. Over the ensuing decades, he was a music reporter for the New York Times, a music editor at Time magazine and the author of A Popular History of Music: From Gregorian Chant to Jazz (1956). He composed his own music and started

a recording production company. Harman’s heroics in Burma received minimal media coverage at the time and seemed to be a lost chapter of World War II aviation history.

And then, Harman and Hladovcak were invited to the 1986 annual meeting of the Helicopter Association International in Anaheim. “At first, I was a little reluctant to go,” Hladovcak said. “I didn’t look forward to seeing Carter as an old man. But you know what, he still looked pretty good.” In fact, Hladovcak joked, Harman still looked like an angel. Articles in the Orange County Register and Vertiflite magazine sparked renewed interest in their story. They would not be forgotten.

Hladovcak died in 1992 at the age of 71. Harman passed away in 2007. He was 88. The obituary that ran in the New York Times stated his “breadth of interests led him to write profiles of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Rosemary Clooney while composing his own operas and symphonic works, and to write a children’s book about skyscrapers at a time when he was also producing recordings of avant-garde music.” The story did not mention his experiences flying an eggbeater on a rescue mission in Burma.

Steve Wartenberg is a writer in Columbus, Ohio. A former newspaper reporter, Wartenberg has written several books. For further reading he recommends Operation Thursday: Birth of the Air Commandos by Herbert A. Mason Jr., Randy G. Bergeron and James A. Renfrow Jr., and An Illustrated History of Military Helicopters by Francis Crosby.

Above: A Sikorsky YR-4B appears insignificant against Burma’s thick jungle canopy. Below: After the war, Harman put helicopters behind him and made a name for himself as a musician and music historian.

WAR IS HELL

James M. Scott has a glowing reputation among Pacific War historians and his books include definitive accounts of the Doolittle Raid and the Battle of Manila. In Black Snow, Scott turns to the United States’ bombing campaign against Japan in 1945.

sume command of Hansell’s Marianas operation.

REVIEWS

The cas t includes Army Air Forces chief Henry “Hap” Arnold; 21st Bomber Command leader Haywood Hansell; and Hansell’s replacement, Curtis LeMay. Scott provides background to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress program and explains how Arnold drove to get the world’s most advanced bomber into combat—prematurely, as it turns out—and how Hansell in the Marianas led faltering attempts to deploy the B-29 against Japan. Waiting in the wings was the hard-driving LeMay, arguably the finest airman of his generation and an absolute master of his trade: flying, navigating and bombing. Arnold, dissatisfied with B-29 operations out of India and China in mid1944, sent LeMay there to take over. Then, in January 1945, LeMay received orders to as -

After trial missions bombing Japan with incendiaries, LeMay shifted tactics. Instead of pursuing Hansell’s doctrinaire daylight high-altitude “precision” bombing against factories, LeMay gambled on a night strike by B-29s loaded with incendiaries and flying at only 5,000 to 7,000 feet. On the night of March 9, LeMay sent 279 B-29s to rain fire on Tokyo. Only 14 were lost, as their bombs burned one-sixth of Tokyo, including hundreds of small “feeder” shops and large factories, and killed some 105,000 people. It was only the beginning of a campaign that “burned more than 178 square miles of sixty-six cities” and killed at least 330,000 people.

Scott provides harrowing descriptions of the horrific firestorm on the night of March 9-10 that left Tokyo’s citizens covered by ashes of “black snow.” His impeccable research includes

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES M. SCOTT

The author of Black Snow talked to Aviation History about the book. Here’s an excerpt. About the Boeing B-29 Superfortress: It cost more money than the atomic bomb, almost twice as much. The atomic bomb was about a $2 billion project. The B-29 comes in at about $3.7 billion. It’s the single most expensive weapon system in the war. And it’s just this radical new bomber. It has a wingspan that is longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight. It has pressurized cabins, the first military plane with pressurized cabins. Men don’t have to fly in flight suits like they do in the B-17. They thought of everything down to ashtrays for the airmen, for their cigarettes.

About Japan’s civilian population: That’s a part of the story that I think has long been missing from our histories of the air campaign, which is the effect on the civilian population there. So many of the civilians at this point in the war, they’re actually more concerned, not with whether Japan’s going to win or lose, but just about surviving from day to day. The submarine blockade has cut off the imports of everything from the raw materials for the war, but also things like rice. That means the average person spends hours every day just figuring out where their next meal is going to come from.

About the destruction: Far more property destruction took place during the conventional campaign than during the two atomic attacks. By the time of Hiroshima, 170 square miles of Japanese cities had been burned. Tokyo was ultimately hit six times over the course of six raids, 56 square miles of the Japanese capital incinerated. And to put that in perspective, Manhattan Island is only 21 square miles.

This transcript has been edited for publication. To see the entire interview online, go to historynet.com/James-M-Scott-interview

contemporary Japanese accounts and interviews with survivors—an invaluable contribution to history. With 60 pages of notes and a 16page bibliography, this well-written and gripping text is certain to become a standard reference. —Barrett Tillman

AT THE DAWN OF AIRPOWER

Americans Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first flights in 1903, but by the time the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, the country had fallen way behind Europe’s major powers in aeronautics. In At the Dawn of Airpower, Laurence Burke, the aviation curator at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, details how that happened in this fascinating study. For starters, he explains that the Wright brothers’ bitter patent dispute with their chief rival, Glenn Curtiss, was a major hindrance, drawing valuable time and energy away from technological innovation.

Another factor was the isolationist Wilson administration, which showed little incentive to have domestic military aviation keep pace with its foreign counterparts. The prevailing attitude was to let the Europeans prove or disprove the airplane’s worth as a weapon. The author posits yet another factor: the sociological concept known as actor/network theory, asserting that the U.S. military’s failure to prepare for the coming war aeronautically was largely due to its inability to form a network through which its pilots (advocates) could persuade the senior officers (patrons) to support their vision for aviation.

Through extensive research, this book sheds new light on the early days of American aviation, uncovering much information about how the U.S. armed forces introduced fixed-wing flight while overcoming doctrinal inertia in a nonaviation culture. In the end, the services ceded America’s embryonic advantage, leaving the impression that those in charge lacked the requisite imagination—a cautionary tale for today’s decision makers. —Philip Handleman

WINGS OF WAR

Do we need another book about the North American P-51 Mustang? It’s a reasonable question, since Amazon currently lists 66 Mustang volumes. But I’m guessing that Wings of War is unlike any of them. On the plus side, the book examines in great detail the Mustang’s fate early in the war, when several P-51As sat largely ignored at the Army Air Forces’ Wright Field testing center. The obverse of this coin is that the authors, while thorough researchers, don’t seem to know much about aircraft.

From the text:

l “[Pilcher] had f ound the propulsion of all future airplanes: gasoline.” (Kerosene and diesel fuel would like a word with you…)

l “Air moving under a wing passes more quickly and air moving over the top moves more slowly.”

OF AIRPOWER

The U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps’ Approach to the Airplane, 1907-1917

by Laurence M. Burke II, Naval Institute Press,

White and Margaret Stanback White, Dutton Caliber, 2022, $29.00

The World War II Fighter Plane that Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly by David Fairbank

BONE A Development & Operational History of the

B-1

The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was a “thundering turbine.”

“The B-17G had an immense bombload capacity of 17,600 pounds.” (Normal maximum was less than half that.)

The B-17 carried “a top ball turret.”

“The Battle of Britain had been won, and there was little use for planes that could fly high.”

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Bomber

by Kenneth P. Katz, Pen & Sword Aviation, 2022, $50.00

My own naive view had been that the Mustang was initially an underachiever because it was too small and light to be accepted as a true fighter by the Army Air Forces. It had a low-altitude engine for a high-altitude war, and it wasn’t needed for any existing missions. This began to change, of course, when the Mustang was re-engined with the Merlin.

The husband-and-wife authors have found a far more complex and devious path from redheaded stepchild to, as they claim in the book’s subtitle, the fighter that saved the Allies. They feel that conspiracies, rivalries, stupidities, cronyism and outright criminality kept the P-51 from useful service with the USAAF until December 1943, just six months before D-Day.

triad, the B-1 had its roots in the alluring but overly ambitious North American XB-70 of the 1960s. The standout design feature of the B-1 was the variable-geometry wing, which, when extended, enables safe takeoffs and landings at low speeds while providing the means, when swept, for supersonic flight. At least equally as daunting as the technological hurdles were the program’s politics. The Carter administration put the brakes on the program while the Reagan administration went full steam, triggering the stop-start disruption that caused the B-1 to remain a work in progress even after it achieved initial operational capability in 1986.

Ironically, the B-1 entered service shortly before the end of the Cold War, for which it was designed, and now it is slated for retirement in the mid-2030s, years sooner than the B-52 it was meant to replace. Nevertheless, modified for a conventional bomb-delivery role, the B-1 has compiled an admirable record of contributions to America’s conflicts. This profusely illustrated and thoroughly researched book conveys a wealth of information and should be required reading for policymakers, contractors and crew. —Philip Handleman

WING-WALKING AND FLYING CIRCUSES

by Peter C. Brown, Air World Books, 2022,

The Mustang’s deployment as a long-range bomber escort made it remarkably effective, however, and Wings of War follows the airplane’s career through the acts of two men crucial to its success: socialite, polo champion and World War I pilot Tommy Hitchcock, who used his position as air attaché at the U.S. embassy in London to lobby for the airplane; and 15.5-victory European Theater ace and Mustang devotee Don Blakeslee, commander of the 4th Fighter Group and the most decorated USAAF pilot of the war.

Despite its faults and the fact that the authors seem to have never met an overwrought metaphor or tortured modifier that they didn’t adore, Wings of War is indeed a useful addition to that long list of Mustang books. —Stephan Wilkinson

THE SUPERSONIC BONE

GOTHIC LINE 1944–45

The USAAF

BARNSTORMERS, WING-WALKING AND FLYING CIRCUSES

Almost since the invention of powered flight, some pilots have been drawn to the alluring pleasures and daunting challenges of aerial exhibition. When this new type of entertainment emerged, ordinary folks flocked to catch a glimpse of the magic in the sky, a tradition that continues with today’s air shows. In Barnstormers, Wing-walking and Flying Circuses , author Peter Brown conducts a selective tour of the intriguing world of performative and competition flying, primarily in the pre-World War I period and the Golden Age between the wars.

Starves Out

the German Army by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Osprey Publishing, 2022, $24

The Rockwell B-1 bomber’s official nickname is Lancer, but it has a more popular moniker that plays on the aircraft’s designation—BONE, derived from the letter “B” for bomber followed by “one.” This tidy factoid is but the beginning of an illuminating technical, political and service history of the speedy long-range bombing platform, masterfully told by Kenneth Katz, an Air Force veteran trained in aerospace engineering at MIT and the University of Michigan.

Seen as the long overdue follow-on to the Boeing B-52 and as an affirmation of the nuclear

Brown covers trailblazing names like aerobat Lincoln Beachey and record-setter Phoebe Omlie, along with major events like the 1927 Dole Air Race and the 1929 Powder Puff Derby; however, in this relatively slim volume he can provide only cursory treatment to his subjects. The 10 chapters offer interesting historical tidbits, but the organization can be disjointed and there is noticeable repetition. Also, sticklers may catch a wayward date or misspelled name and readers may wonder why the photo section, which contains many illuminating archival images, has nearly two dozen pictures of modern air show airplanes and performers that are barely mentioned in the text.

SPRING 2023

These quibbles aside, the book makes clear that stunting in aviation’s infancy was dangerous and deadly, leading to stronger regulation. At the same time, the daring flyers who pushed the limits set the first rough parameters for a field of endeavor that would influence and ultimately transform the world’s daily life. The point is underscored in a quote from future British Prime Minister David Lloyd George upon observing the 1909 Reims Air Meet: “flying machines are no longer toys and dreams…they are a fact.” —Philip Handleman

GOTHIC LINE 1944-45

Gothic Line 1944-45 describes the intensive and highly effective interdiction campaign carried out by the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II. Carried out largely by medium bombers and fighter-bombers, the objective of interdiction missions was to block the flow of materiel from the enemy’s heartland to their troops at the front. Without that constant flow of supplies, the enemy’s army couldn’t fight and would be compelled to withdraw or surrender.

During the summer of 1944 the Germans in Italy withdrew behind their well-prepared “Gothic Line” of defenses in Northern Italy, which they believed to be impregnable. Their army, however, had to be supplied from Austria on the other side of the Alps via the Brenner Pass. Day after day bombers of the U.S. Twelfth Air Force attacked the same roads, bridges and railways and, in turn, were targeted by the same anti-aircraft gunners. In addition, because the strategic bombers of the Eighth Air Force received priority for aircrew replacements, the number of missions required to be flown in Italy were repeatedly raised, creating the morale issue noted by Joseph Heller in his novel Catch22. The largely overlooked sacrifices of the campaign were ultimately rewarded as the delivery of materiel to the German army was reduced from 600,000 tons per month to practically nothing. —Robert Guttman

BOOKS IN BRIEF

AIRWARE

TINY COMBAT ARENA Microprose, $20

Airware prefers to look at completed software rather than betas or previews, but Tiny Combat Arena (requires Windows 10, 1GB RAM, 1GB hard drive space, microprose.com/games/tiny-combat-arena) proved worth a look. It’s a step back to the simulation genre’s roots, when products were more game-like. Despite the technical limitations of the time, they tended to have more robust personalities and were easier to operate than contemporary counterparts.

TCA is referred to as “early release” software but is available for players to purchase and preview. It aims to be a modern simulation

that’s a throwback to the sweet spot between realistic simulation and action game. What’s available currently is the ability to fly an AV-8B Harrier in a small arena populated with a few islands, and a battle demo where the player flies the Harrier in support of ground forces.

The flight model is realisitc enough to keep players honest as they monitor energy, fuel and altitude states. The Harrier’s vectoring nozzles are also modeled, and they’re easy to operate but take practice to master. The free flight mode is a great place to get that practice, but things are more serious in the battle demo, an island conflict where each side tries to overrun the opposing side’s bases.

The player is the X factor in this fight as the lone ground support aircraft in the battle. Teams of armor trundle along beneath the player and fight with computer-controlled opponents. Aircraft like the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II are seen in video clips and screen captures, so it’s likely they’ll be in the final release. Northrop F-5 and Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG21 fighters circle but currently do not engage the ground targets. Anti-aircraft defenses will target and engage the player and recent patches have improved their responsiveness.

The classic polygonal graphics and simple controls certainly give the game a throwback feel. But modern computing power gives TCA superior performance and features quantities of vehicles operating in the arena its 1990s counterparts couldn’t match.

TCA’s final release date is unknown. In the few months that I’ve tinkered with it, the developer released two updates and a patch, so work is progressing. We’ll revisit the title when it lands. —Bernard Dy

THE LEARJET HISTORY: Beginnings, Innovations and Utilization by Peter G. Hamel and Gary D. Park (Springer, 2022, $159.99). A comprehensive and well-illustrated history of the influential business jet. FIRST CROSSING: The 1919 TransAtlantic Flight of Alcock and Brown by Robert O. Harder (Sunbury Press, 2022, $19.95). Aviation History contributor Harder provides a “creative nonfiction” account of this historic flight. THE SKY AND I: How I Learned to Fly…Before I Flew Around the World Six Years Later by Ann Holtgren Pellegreno (The Paragon Agency, 2022, $30). In 1967 Pellegreno recreated (and finished) Amelia Earhart’s around-the-world flight. Here she writes about her introduction to aviation. THE MIGHTY EIGHTH: Masters of the Air over Europe 1942-45 by Donald Nijboer (Osprey Publishing, 2022, $40). A richly illustrated history of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in World War II. FROM ORPHAN TO HIGH-FLYER by Denis Elliott and Philip Martin (Philip Martin, 2021, $14.95). Martin befriended RAF pilot Elliott and had him tell his story in this “spoken autobiography.” www.fromorphantohighflier.com.

THE FIRST GENERATION

Who, flying a Deperdussin 1912 Racing Monoplane on September 9, 1912, was first to exceed 100 mph?

Maurice Prévost B. Hubert Latham

Jules Védrines D. Roland Garros

In which aircraft did Juan Bielovucic complete the first flight over the Alps on January 25, 1913?

Nieuport 4 B. Hanriot monoplane

Bristol Boxkite D. Deperdussin TT

In which aircraft did Roland Garros make the first trans-Mediterranean flight on September 23, 1913?

OH, THE MONOTONY!

FINAL APPROACH

History often dwells on the demise of the Hindenburg, the gigantic German airship that went down in flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. People don’t often think about its existence before that, including the five years it was under construction, or the fact that it crossed the Atlantic 35 times (17 round trips and its final, doomed passage). In this 1935 image, a Luftschiffbau Zeppelin construction team in Friedrichshafen, Germany, painstakingly works on the cotton-cloth skin of the 804-foot dirigible in advance of its launch in March of the following year. The surface of the mammoth craft—the largest airship ever built—received five coats of a varnish that was mixed with heatreflective silver.

WWI Ace Conquers

Time Travel

Recalling military timepieces of the early 20th century, the Flyboy® Blue is your secret advantage.

In World War I, Lieutenant Costes fought head-to-head against lead-spitting enemy planes over the Balkans. Ten years later, the daring French pilot navigated the pitch black skies over the South Atlantic. He soared across three time zones from Senegal to Brazil, setting the record for the world’s first non-stop flight across the South Atlantic.

For WW I pilots like Costes, victory was decided in a fraction of a second. The first multi-function wristwatches forever changed air combat, allowing pilots to time complicated maneuvers and coordinate attacks. Every decent Ace had one. Now, it’s your turn.

As a fully-loaded precision timepiece with fighting good looks that’s also priced to take out the competition, the Flyboy® Blue is without a doubt, your secret advantage. We studied classic aviator timepieces to match the vintage design. Then, our watchmakers updated the movement for the 21st century, making it even more accurate than the originals. Three tachymeters and a movable bezel measure speed and ascent and chronograph functions measure elapsed time. Complications mark minutes and hours and include a 24-hour display.

Satisfaction is 100% Guaranteed. Take the Flyboy® Blue for a test flight. If it fails to impress, send it back within 30 days for a refund of the item price. But, we’re confident this ace will accomplish its mission. Limited Reserves. A watch of this caliber takes over six months