On the B-17E, the tail gunner may have been the most important gunner. He used two.50 caliber machine guns to defend the back quarter of the aircraft. The tail guns…
Since the late 1940s, pilots have loved and imitated Chuck Yeager’s laconic, folksy drawl Every time you sit on a plane while traveling for the holidays, a voice that is…
As the first pilot to purposefully ram a B-17 Flying Fortress, Sergeant Oda Tadao received praise in the Japanese media and received a posthumous promotion. It is unlikely that the…
Trains were never safe from roaming P-47 Thunderbolts on armed reconnaissance missions. Yet German strategies quickly made strafing them a difficult and risky task Late in December 1944, as Col.…
There is an auction for the sidestick controller from the F-16A #78-0322. The former Israeli Air Force fighter was one of six aircraft that attacked Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in…
Some of the details of these flights are still shrouded in historical obscurity, partly because the 14-hour Wake Island to Port Moresby sector required the B-17D bombers to fly (illegally)…
Three months after V-E Day, on August 20, 1945, the B-36 Peacemaker strategic bomber was presented. Its first flight took place on August 8, 1946 Before the US entered World…
The prisoners who operated the gun turrets claimed that they couldn’t spin their turrets quickly enough to take one of those creatures out The Me 262 Schwalbe, which was created…
For the Sopwith Camel, training fatalities (380) were almost equal to combat fatalities (420) On December 22, 1916, the Camel—the most famous of the Sopwith fighters—made its debut. It was…
The US Navy created the F4U Corsair as a carrier-based fighter, but there was no immediate plan to give it to the Marines Nothing more represented Marine fighter aviation during…