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AVIATION

AUTUMN 2023

26 NORTH TO ALASKA

When the U.S. Army Air Corps needed to rehab its image, it dispatched B-10 bombers on an epic mission.

BY DAVE KINDY

36 THE RAF’S LAST BIPLANE

The Gloster Gladiator looked outdated when World War II started. It was.

BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

46 THE BOMBING OF UAL TRIP 23

A Boeing 247 was on its way to Chicago when it crashed, the beginning of a 90-year mystery.

BY STEVE WARTENBERG

52 BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Want propellers, jets or a mixture of both? These Douglas aircraft provided all three.

BY DAVID W. TEMPLE

60 BAD REPUTATION

Why Britain’s B.E.2c doesn’t deserve all the brickbats tossed its way.

5 MAILBAG 6 BRIEFING 10 AVIATORS 14 FLIGHT LOG 16 EXTREMES 18 PORTFOLIO 24 FROM THE COCKPIT 66 REVIEWS 70 FLIGHT TEST 72 FINAL APPROACH DEPARTMENTS 46 60 52

ON THE COVER: A Ron Cole illustration depicts a Martin B-10 bomber of the 1934 Alaska flight as it overflies rugged northern territory.

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN

LESSON NOT LEARNED?

NO HOT AIR

Regarding the article “A Sunday with Lilienthal” [Summer 2023], superb as it was, it was disappointing in that it stated, “By the 1890s, hot-air balloons were all the rage.” I feel oblig ed to remind you that hot-air balloons were not any kind of rage until the 1960s after the development, by Paul Yost, of the propane burner specifically designed for ballooning. Although the first balloon flight, originating in France in 1783 and conducted by the Montgolfier brothers, was raised by hot air produced by an internal blaze, on August 27 of that year the first hydrogen balloon went up, also in France. From that point on, hydrogen became the preferred method of lift for balloons until the 1960s.

Donald Gruber, Clinton, Illinois

A CAT’S LIFE

Your article on Wiley Post’s fatal crash in Alaska [Spring 2023] really resonated with me. I’ve been researching the history of Quincy, Illinois’ airports. Their most famous day at the now-closed Monroe Airport was September 21, 1933, the day Wiley Post nearly totaled his beloved Winnie Mae on takeoff. The scenario was eerily similar— loss of power shortly after takeoff with no chance to recover. This time he spent a few days in the hospital, but he doesn’t seem to have become any more cautious.

Mark Lueckenhoff, Ewing, Missouri

DON’T FORGET THE NAVY

MAILBAG

Regarding the Milestone about the Berlin Airlift [Summer 2023], my Mom and I spent the winter of 1948-49 at her family’s ranch north of Winnett, Montana, while Dad was on the Berlin Airlift. He was assigned to VR-8, a Navy transport squadron flying Douglas R5Ds (the Navy version of C-54s), redeployed to Rhein-Main near Frankfurt just after transferring to Hawaii. The commanding officer of VR-8 wrote a March 17, 1949, newsletter covering the first four months of the deployment and reported, “For the third consecutive month VR-8 has led all other squadrons engaged in the Airlift.” Surprisingly, I have never seen any media report of the Navy’s involvement in the Airlift, aside from a contemporary Winnett Times piece showing Aviation Machinist Mate First Class Paul B. Runsvold working on an aircraft engine. Dad said many of the R5Ds he overhauled later at NAS Corpus Christi still had coal dust in the bilges from transporting coal to Berlin.

James M. Runsvold, Caldwell, Idaho

I saw the “Briefing” item about the kittens that were born in the T-33 [“Career Change,” Spring 2023]. My wife and I were the first to adopt one of the “Cockpit Kittens” from the Hickory Aviation Museum/Humane Society of Catawba County last December. We drove to North Carolina and spent a little time in the shelter. The only one of the five (they were 12 weeks old at the time) that wanted anything to do with humans at that point was the kitten who popped his head up in the canopy in the photo and who is now a “Celebri-cat.” He was given the shelter name of Mohawk, but we changed it to a more appropriate name for a cat born in T-33 —T-Bird.

Jeff Rhodes, Hiram, Georgia

END OF THE ARROW

The excellent article on the demise of the Avro Arrow [Summer 2023] emphasized the thorough infiltration of the Arrow project by the Soviets. But I believe another facet of the story was at the heart of the project’s cancellation. From the time John Diefenbaker became prime minister of Canada in 1957, he embarked on a sweeping change in domestic agenda, particularly an aggressive agricultural policy, including a stabilized income for farmers, plus pension improvements. The money had to come from somewhere else in the budget. Two years later, the ax fell. The politics of that decision is, as mentioned in the article, a controversial subject to this day.

John A. Schrandt, Madison, Wisconsin

MIG KILLER REACHES USAF “HALL OF FAME”

AMcDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle known as a “MiG Killer” was flown for the last time on a trip to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, on April 25. The only jet of its kind to destroy two enemy MiG29s, the airplane will go on permanent display after it is cleaned and restored to original condition.

BRIEFING

On March 26, 1999, Air Force pilot Colonel Jeff Hwang was flying the F-15 on patrol during the Kosovo War when he spotted a radar blip some 37 nautical miles away over the border in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Hwang, who went by the call sign “Claw,” alerted wingman Captain J. “Boomer” McMurray and both tracked the potential hostile aircraft as they flew along the border as part of Operation Allied Force. When they were within 30 nautical miles, the bogey split in two. It turned out to be a pair of Mikoyan MiG-29s, known to NATO as Fulcrums, flown by Yugoslav pilots.

As the enemy jets got closer, Hwang determined the threat was real and decided to engage. He fired two AIM-120 missiles at the targets while McMurray launched one. A few moments later, Hwang’s Fulcrums exploded. Hwang received credit for a double victory. It was later determined that one of his missiles took out both Fulcrums, earning fame for both the pilot and the jet, which had two green stars painted on it for the simultaneous shootdowns. (One of the MiG pilots ejected; the other was killed.)

Hwang retired in 2014, but his F-15C Eagle—tail number 86156—continued to soar on with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Until this year, that is. Now this historic MiG killer has reached the “hall of fame.” —Dave Kindy

The McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle makes its final approach to Dayton for delivery to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

Colonel Jeff Hwang, photographed here in 2014 on the day he retired from the Air Force, shows off two stars symbolizing his MiG kills. Above: Lt. Col. Matthew “Beast” Tanis of the Massachusetts Air National Guard speaks to the press after delivering the aircraft to the Air Force museum.

NEW EARHART MUSEUM OPENS

On April 14, 2023, a new museum honoring Amelia Earhart opened in Atchison, Kansas, the city where the aviator was born in 1897.

The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum features interactive exhibits that celebrate the legacy of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932) and inspire young people to follow in her footsteps. “We want people to take away the fact that she truly is relevant today,” says Karen Seaberg, the museum director and the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum’s centerpiece is the last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, the same type of aircraft Earhart was flying on an attempted around-the-world flight when she disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937. In other exhibits, visitors can get a sense of what it was like to rivet an airplane, experience how aviators from Earhart’s time navigated by the stars and explore the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines that powered the Electra. They can also hear recordings of Earhart’s voice and climb into a life-size reproduction of the Lockheed’s cockpit.

For aviation buffs, the big attraction is the Lockheed. The former owner, who had named the airplane Muriel, after Earhart’s sister, had hoped to

AIR QUOTE

restore the airplane and fly it around the world, but ill health intervened. “When we found out that she was going to sell the plane, we formed the foundation very quickly and raised the money to buy the airplane,” says Seaberg. “So that’s how it all started.” The foundation also spearheaded placement of an Earhart statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. The statue was installed in July 2022 and a copy stands in front of the museum.

The museum addresses the fact of Earhart’s disappearance and lets visitors vote on their solution to the mystery. But Seaberg stresses that Earhart’s final flight is not the museum’s focus. “Our mission is really to get people interested in her story,” she says. —Tom Huntington

Hear more from Karen Seaberg and take a look at the museum by going to historynet.com/ earhart-museum

Left: The Earhart statue that stands outside the museum is a copy of one recently placed in the U.S. Capitol. Right: Visitors admire Muriel, a Lockheed 10-E like the one Earhart was flying when she disappeared in 1937.

“This business of looking is the most important part of a fighter-pilot’s job. You’ve got to have a rubber neck and you’ve got to keep it moving the whole time from the moment you get into the air to the moment you arrive back at your base.”

—ROALD DAHL,

FROM THE STORY “SHOT DOWN OVER LIBYA” (1942)

RESTORED WELLINGTON HIGHLIGHTS RAF EXHIBIT

Good things come to those who wait. That’s the case with the Vickers Wellington bomber that serves as the centerpiece of a new exhibit at the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands in Cosford, England. Opened in May, the exhibit returned the venerable Wellington— one of only two remaining—to the public eye after a restoration that took more than a decade. (The other surviving Wellington is at the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey.)

The twin-engine Wellington, with its unique “basket weave” or geodetic internal structure, was the RAF’s most advanced bomber at the start of World War II. The prototype first flew in June 1936; after that airplane crashed in 1937, the Wellington received an extensive redesign and emerged as the Mk.I. By the time production ceased in October 1945, the British had built more than 11,400 Wellingtons, making it the most-produced British bomber, although by war’s end it had been relegated to transport and naval roles. The museum’s Wellington was built in 1944 and served for navigation training during the war. It remained with the RAF until 1953 and then went on

AERO ARTIFACT

display at the RAF Museum in London. In 2010 it was shipped to the Midlands location for the start of restoration work, which included replacing all its Irish linen covering.

The bomber now provides the focus for the museum’s new permanent exhibit, “Strike Hard, Strike Sure: Bomber Command 1939–1945,” which opened on the 80th anniversary of the famous Dambusters expedition. Flown on May 16, 1943, by 19 Avro Lancaster bombers led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the mission targeted German dams in the Ruhr Valley with specially designed “bouncing bombs.” Besides the Wellington, the Bomber Command exhibit includes a Bristol Blenheim bomber and the Victoria Cross that was awarded to Gibson.

You can find the museum’s website at rafmuseum.org.uk/midlands

MALTA HAS FAITH

The story of the Sea Gladiators that defended the Mediterranean island of Malta during the early days of World War II has become a legendary tale of courage against overwhelming odds (see the story about the Gladiator that begins on page 36). Three of the airplanes became known, retroactively, as Faith, Hope and Charity. Outnumbered Sea Gladiators did duel against Italian aircraft over Malta, but there were more than three of them and they were later reinforced by British Spitfires. Nonetheless, the airplanes became Maltese heroes at a time when the beleaguered island needed them most. Today only one—or part of one—remains. The airplane later christened Faith now resides, wingless, in Valletta’s National War Museum.

Left: The restored Wellington is a focus for a new Bomber Command exhibit at the RAF Museum Midlands. Right: A view of the interior highlights the bomber’s “basket weave” construction.

RAZORBACK RETURNS TO THE AIR

The P-47D-23 Thunderbolt from the Dakota Territory Air Museum in Minot, North Dakota, which was featured in last issue’s “Briefing,” has returned to the sky. On May 13, 2023, the Razorback version of the World War II fighter lifted off a runway in Bemidji, Minnesota, at the end of an eight-year restoration by AirCorps Aviation. Test pilot Bernie Vasquez flew the 35-minute flight. Eventually the airplane will receive the paint scheme of Bonnie, a P-47 flown in the Pacific Theater by Bill Dunham of the 342nd Fighter Squadron of the Fifth Air Force’s 348th Fighter Group. Dunham, who retired from the Air Force in 1970 as a brigadier general, scored 15 of his 16 victories with the P-47.

MILESTONES

PACKING HEAT

On September 11, 1953, a U.S. Navy F3D Skyknight fighter took off from Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at China Lake, California. The Skyknight, armed with an experimental heat-seeking AIM-9A Sidewinder missile, homed in on an unmanned F6F-5K Hellcat drone. The Skyknight released the prototype missile and the F6F erupted in flames. It was the first successful test of the air-to-air Sidewinder and the culmination of years of research at China Lake.

The Sidewinder was the brainchild of Navy physicist William B. McLean, head of the NOTS Aviation Ordnance Division. McLean theorized that a heat-seeking missile would be more effective than the radarguided missiles being developed concurrently. While the first-generation Sidewinders had limitations—they were useful only at short ranges, for example—they were still more effective than anything else in the Navy’s arsenal. The Navy adopted the Sidewinder in 1956, while the Air Force didn’t accept it until 1964.

The Sidewinder’s first use in battle came in 1958, when U.S.-backed Republic of China pilots downed four Red Chinese MiG-15s and -17s with AIM-9Bs during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. The weapon proved only partially successful in Vietnam, but later variants increased its success rate. The Sidewinder is still in the U.S. arsenal and those of 31 other nations, with the more than 110,000 missiles produced accounting for approximately 270 aircraft kills. The AIM-9X Block II, built by Raytheon, is the latest variant. It can hit targets in a 360-degree radius from the launch point, including targets on the ground. —Larry Porges

Images taken on September 11, 1953, capture the first successful test of a Sidewinder, which took out a F6F-5K Hellcat drone.

A PISTOL

BY EILEEN A. BJORKMAN

AVIATORS

In 1981, Captain Carmen Lucci appeared to have an unlimited future in the U.S. Air Force. The Ohio native had earned a full scholarship as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s first female AFROTC cadet, and in 1975 she had received her Air Force commission as a distinguished graduate. Her next stop was the University of Tennessee Space Institute, where she earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1977, she entered Air Force active duty.

Lucci had her sights set on being an astronaut, so during her first assignment at Los Angeles Air Force Station, she applied to attend pilot training and the flight test engineering course at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS). Accepted to both, she turned down pilot training to attend TPS and arrived at Edwards Air Force Base in June 1980. She

was the fourth woman to attend Air Force TPS; all the others had also been engineers, since the Air Force had just recently begun to train women pilots.

One of Lucci’s TPS classmates, fighter pilot Carl Meade, arrived at Edwards a few days before the class started and checked into the visiting officers’ quarters. The clerk on duty commented, “One of your classmates is already here. And she’s quite a pistol.”

Meade thought, “She? A pistol?”

About 30 minutes later, he received a message from the pistol: “I’m Carmen. Let’s go to dinner.”

The two became fast friends, occupying quarters near each other and studying frequently together with two other classmates. They had hectic schedules, with student flights during the mornings and academics in the afternoons. Evenings and weekends were for analyzing data, writing reports and endless reading and homework to learn the theoretical underpinnings of everything from aircraft climb performance to out-of-control spins.

Lucci loved to fly. During test missions with her in the backseat of a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, classmate Ted Wierzbanowski remembered that they often had a little free time after collecting the test points they needed for the day. As they flew back to Edwards, Lucci often prodded him for a little extra excitement by saying, “Teddy, do me another Immelmann!” Bob Hood recalled how much fun he and Lucci had on their last flight together as they flew a low-level route in a Northrop T-38 Talon over the desert terrain north of Edwards. However, when Lucci wasn’t zipping through maneuvers in a jet, her lifestyle was more low-key. She cooked, played backgammon and regularly stole cookies from the lunch that Meade packed for himself every day. In 1979 she had married Air Force Captain Thomas Humes.

On March 3, 1981, Lucci was scheduled to fly an early mission with classmate D.J. Halladay, a Canadian Armed Forces captain, in the school’s variable-stability Douglas B-26 Invader. The B-26 had been extensively modified so the flight control system could be altered to make it seem as though it was a different type of aircraft. By repositioning a few dials, the civilian test pilot instructor, Stephen Monagan, could make the B-26 behave like a lumbering B-52, a nimbler C-130, or even an aircraft that didn’t exist, giv-

Carmen Lucci was one of the first women to attend the U.S. Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Lucci never had the chance to reach her full potential.

CAPTAIN CARMEN LUCCI AIMED TO BE AN ASTRONAUT, BUT FATE INTERVENED

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ing students the opportunity to see how different flight control system designs made it easier or harder to fly an airplane. The B-26 was nearing retirement; it was only going to be used for a few more flights and would be replaced by a more modern Learjet.

The three aircrew took off from Edwards about 7:30 a.m. for a local flight of about an hour. After the B-26 failed to return on schedule, Meade—who was supposed to fly the aircraft next—and other TPS personnel called nearby military bases, thinking the crew might have diverted for an emergency. No one had seen the aircraft. Airborne pilots searched near Edwards, thinking the Invader might have landed on a lakebed. Nothing. A formal search party was launched. The students went to their afternoon classes.

About 3:00 p.m., someone entered the classroom with grim news: wreckage from the B-26 had been located. There were no survivors.

The class sat in stunned silence until the instructor dismissed them for the day.

Investigators determined that the left wing had separated from the B-26 during maneuvers at about 8,000 feet.

Meade delivered a eulogy for Lucci at a memorial service a few days later. After the service, a flight of F-4s thundered over the chapel at low altitude to honor the fallen aviators. Inside the chapel, their names were later engraved on a plaque dedicated to test personnel lost in accidents at Edwards.

Three decades later, on March 16, 2012, many of Lucci’s classmates attended a dedication ceremony to name a control room at the test pilot school in honor of her supreme sacrifice. Colonel Noel Zamot, TPS Commandant at the time, said in an Air Force news release: “Tenacity, character, discipline, integrity, confidence, and intellectual curiosity are timeless values and they are what make you successful at the United States Air Force Test Pilot School and in life. Captain Lucci exemplified those values.”

About the same time in 2012, one of aircraft wreck-finder Pat Macha’s teams visited the B-26 crash site. Macha and his teams made several visits to the site over the next few years. During the final visit, a team member noticed a chain in the dirt. When she picked it up, it still held Lucci’s dogtags, badly bent from the severe impact, but otherwise in perfect condition. Macha’s “Project Remembrance,” which returns personal items located in aircraft wreckage to families, kicked into gear. The Lucci family passed the tags along to her classmates, who mounted them in a shadow box to accompany the small display already outside the control room named for her. On September 20, 2019, Lucci’s classmates assembled once again to dedicate the shadow box and remember a pilot whose promising life had been cut short. “The dedication shows how the flight test community never forgets and also reminds folks that what this community does is risky, but also that those risks are worth the capability we bring to the warfighter,” said Wierzbanowski. “The dedication brought back a lot of good memories and a lot of sadness. It should remind us all that every day is a blessing.”

Carmen Lucci is still the only female flight test engineer to lose her life as a student or graduate of any test pilot school in the world.

Above: The B-26 in which Lucci died had been modified so it could mimic the handling characteristics of different aircraft. Left: Classmate Ted Wierzbanowski unveils a shadow box outside the Carmen Lucci Control Room at the Test Pilot School during the dedication ceremony in 2019.

TODAY IN HISTORY

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITED BEAR RUN IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND REQUESTED A SURVEY OF THE AREA AROUND A PARTICULAR WATERFALL. PITTSBURGH BUSINESSMAN EDGAR J. KAUFMANN HAD COMMISSIONED WRIGHT TO BUILD A COUNTRY HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE WATERFALL. THE FAMOUS ARCHITECT SURPRISED HIS CLIENT BY INSTEAD DESIGNING THE HOME OVER THE WATERFALL. FALLINGWATER COST $155,000 TO COMPLETE IN 1941. THE HOME WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO VISITORS IN 1964.

For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

MORRELL’S FOLLY

THE RISE AND FALL OF A CALIFORNIA DREAM

BY RICHARD J. GOODRICH

Was San Francisco’s John Morrell a stockswindling grifter or a deluded visionary? In 1906, Morrell, president of a business venture he called the National Airship Company, announced plans to build a fleet of airships to link America’s cities. It was an enticing dream: dirigibles, nearly a quarter of a mile long, that could cross the country in a day or reach London in 24 hours. A San Francisco businessman could fly to New York for lunch and be back home in time for bed. The railroads were dead, Morrell promised. Air travel was the future.

Although Morrell’s vision outpaced early 20th-century technology, he attracted numerous investors in San Francisco. After all, this was the hometown of August Greth and Thomas Baldwin, the innovators behind America’s first dirigibles. Greth had taken his California Eagle aloft in October 1903; Baldwin had flown his California Arrow the following August. Perhaps Morrell could build on their success.

In August 1907, Morrell unveiled his first airship. Named Ariel, it was 600 feet long and driven by five automobile engines. Before the maiden flight, an October gale snapped the balloon’s tether lines and drove it across San

Francisco Bay. The trees of Fair Oaks, California, shredded the fragile fabric and destroyed the airship.

Dismayed but undefeated, Morrell started work on a replacement. At the same time, the National Airship Company opened a sales office in Portland, Oregon. Advertisements in the Oregon Daily Journal announced that the company planned to have its new dirigible in service by April 1, 1908. The airship would fly the San Francisco to Portland route, carrying 100 passengers and 30 tons of mail. Investors purchasing stock at the bargain rate of ten cents a share could expect exponential returns.

The company’s ambitious claims attracted the interest of the federal government, and the U.S. Post Office opened an investigation into

Above: John Morrell’s 450-foot-long dirigible gets inflated in Berkeley, California, prior to its one and only flight. Top: On May 23, 1908, Morrell took the airship aloft. The sag visible in the middle of the envelope is a sign of impending trouble. The craft managed to reach a height of about 150 feet before failing completely and crashing to the ground.

whether Morrell’s activities constituted mail fraud. Meanwhile, a disgruntled investor named S.L. Jacobs filed a complaint against Morrell in San Francisco Police Court, claiming that he had violated section 564 of the California Penal Code—making false statements about his company to investors. Morrell was arrested and released on bail while awaiting a trial.

Morrell realized that he required a working dirigible to establish his legitimacy. Hoping for a quick result, he scaled back his ambitious plans. The new airship would be smaller, only 450 feet long and 60 feet in diameter. It would serve as a proof of concept and a training vessel, a preparatory step toward a 1,250-foot behemoth that Morrell envisioned.

As the airship neared completion, Colonel Fedor Postnikov, a former Russian army balloonist, expressed concerns about the quality of Morrell’s materials. The envelope, made of light canvas coated with varnish, might have been sufficient for a small balloon, Postnikov informed reporters, but the fabric was unlikely to resist the pressures found in a larger airship. Morrell dismissed Postnikov’s qualms: he said his envelope employed a secret varnish that made it stronger than it appeared. The airship would be fine.

San Francisco refused permission for a second launch, so Morrell relocated to nearby Berkeley. He tried to keep his official launch date a secret, but the news leaked. On May 23, 1908, thousands of people arrived to watch the first flight. The balloon, a bulging, misshapen sack filled with 500,000 cubic feet of hydrogen-based illuminating gas, strained against its tether lines. The official crew consisted of fourteen men and two photographers. Morrell spent the final minutes before launch evicting adventurers who had stowed away in the netting beneath the airship.

Shortly before noon Morrell ordered the tether lines slackened. His crew started the ship’s five engines. As the dirigible rose, the envelope appeared to be unevenly inflated. The rear end of the envelope was fine, a taut, smoothly stretched surface. The bow, however, seemed underinflated, a section of limp, wrinkled fabric. Morrell was unconcerned, believing the pressure would equalize along the length of the airship. He ordered the flight to proceed.

The balloon climbed to 150 feet. As it ascended, its longitudinal disparity worsened. The weight of the forward engine, which was inadequately supported by the underinflated section of the balloon, dragged the nose down.

With the nose deflated and a gigantic tear visible in the rear section, Morrell’s dirigible begins its final descent. This marked the end of Morrell’s attempts at building airships.

As the tilt increased, the trapped gas rushed aft, exacerbating the problem. Morrell shouted orders to his crew in a vain attempt to level the unbalanced airship, but it was too late. The ship pitched forward and entered a shallow dive.

The stressed fabric burst with a loud crack. Stitches unraveled along a weak seam and pressurized gas poured through the tear. The dirigible accelerated toward the ground. The crowd screamed; panicked onlookers fled the impact zone. “Down plunged the airship,” wrote the San Francisco Call . “It heaved from side to side, like some wild monster, attempting to shake off the desperate, clinging forms, hanging like spiders from its sides.”

Some of the crew jumped clear as the dirigible’s nose plowed into the ground. Others were buried beneath torn canvas, sundered nets and snapped steel tubing. Rescuers emerged from the frightened crowd and tore the balloon with knives to free the trapped men. Injuries ranged from broken bones to internal injuries and concussions. A propeller struck Morrell, cutting him and breaking both of his legs.

The dirigible was destroyed, but, miraculously, no one died in the crash even though most of the crew ended up in the hospital. In the days that followed the accident, souvenir hunters looted the wreckage. By the time Morrell left the hospital, little remained of his dream.

Morrell blamed the accident on his investors—their lawsuits had forced the accelerated pace of development, he said, leading to a flawed product. Nevertheless, he had produced a dirigible, delivering a version of what his stock prospectus had promised.

He vowed to try again, promising to build a bigger and better airship, but legal difficulties occupied his attention for the next year. The Berkeley police department forbade further flights in the city, and, although he managed to convince the courts of his legitimacy, he never built another airship. The age of the airplane had arrived in California, but it would still be decades before transcontinental jets—not leviathan dirigibles— whisked San Francisco businessmen to New York for lunch.

THE THICK AND THIN OF PROPER SPIN

IT WASN’T THE ENGINES THAT DID IN THE WESTLAND WHIRLWIND

BY MATT BEARMAN

EXTREMES

It could have been a game-changer. The twin-engine, single-seat Westland Whirlwind, produced by a small company in southwest England, looked like a formidably potent weapon. The four 20mm cannon packed close together in the nose could take out a tank when nothing else flying could. It was also innovative. It had a bubble canopy, intakes in the wing’s leading edges, slats and Fowler flaps. It had a slab-sided fuselage over the wing, which was the ultimate solution to high-speed interference drag. When it first flew on October 11, 1938, the Whirlwind was arguably the fastest, most heavily armed fighter in the world.

Today, very few have heard of it. Westland built only 114 and the Royal Air Force sent the Whirlwind to Scotland to keep it out of the fighting during the Battle of Britain. It has often been labeled a failure. The reason given has always been the inability of its two 885-hp Rolls-Royce Peregrine engines to deliver speed at altitude.

The RAF’s testing program had given the aircraft a clean bill of health and a ceiling of 31,000 feet. However, as the first trickle of aircraft began to arrive with No. 25 and 263 Squadrons in 1940, service pilots began to question why the altitude performance wasn’t what it was

during test flights. “It must be emphasised…that the performance of the Whirlwind above 20,000 feet falls off rapidly, and it is considered that above 25,000 feet its fighting qualities are very poor,” read one report. “The maximum height so far attained is 27,000 feet but on every occasion that a height test has been carried out there has been a minor defect, either in airscrew revolutions or in lack of boost pressure.”

The reply from the technical director of the test facility was straightforward—the aircraft in service were identical in all respects to the one tested, so the difference couldn’t be explained. The Whirlwind’s own designer, the eccentric W.E.W. “Teddy” Petter, blamed a fall-off in boost pressures delivered by the superchargers with height at “twice the rate anticipated.” By doing so, he placed the blame with the RollsRoyce engines division.

The key difference between the tested prototype and the Whirlwinds in service was considered too minor to be worth commenting on officially at the time. It was the propeller. The prototype sent by Westland to the RAF had a oneoff Rotol propeller design, not the de Havilland/ Hamilton propellers that the production Whirlwinds

The metal blades of the de Havilland props were very thick for a high-performance fighter— they had a 9.6% thickness-to-chord ratio (at the standard measuring point 70% of the way out

received.

A Westland Whirlwind shows what it can do on April 20, 1944. By then the airplane had been classified as a failure. At low altitudes the Whirlwind was formidable, but its performance declined as it climbed.

along the blade). For comparison, the Spitfire’s blades were similar, but at 7.6% the ratio was smaller. This wouldn’t matter at low speed, but in a climb at 15,000 feet the tip of the Whirlwind’s propeller moved at Mach 0.72. Here, the difference between the 6% ratio at the tip of the Spitfire’s prop and the 8% of the Whirlwind’s was literally critical, meaning the tips approached the speed of sound. But an even bigger problem came with the combination of a thick profile blade with a constant speed mechanism.

That mechanism was—and remains—a widely used solution for keeping an engine turning at the optimum speed to produce maximum horsepower, whether the aircraft is moving slowly or at its maximum speed. This is done by changing the “bite”—the angle of attack of the propeller blades. Increasing the blades’ angle of attack increases the drag and thus the braking effect on the engine. To maintain a constant RPM at varying speeds, the pilot controls the propeller’s pitch. A constant speed unit automates the process, with the pilot setting the desired RPM. The unit senses if shaft speed drops, and “fines” the blades appropriately by changing pitch. The Whirlwind had two de Havilland constant speed units under its sleek cowls.

Dynamic tests in 1938 showed that the massive onset of drag above critical Mach would cause the blades to pivot—reduce pitch—as the constant speed mechanism hunted for a lower-drag condition to maintain RPM. Mach number lowers with altitude, so as the Whirlwind climbed at a constant RPM, relative Mach over the blades increased. Moving steadily inwards, more of the blade “went critical” as the phenomenon of compressibility created shock waves, drag rose exponentially and the blade turned farther to compensate.

This could reduce the blade angle of attack beyond zero. Add in any amount of aircraft pitch (and in a climb at altitude the aircraft would be pitched several degrees higher than line-of-flight) and shock waves would run up and down the blades as they spun. Wildly varying dynamic pressures would pass into the ram-air intakes, which sit immediately behind the blades. The intermittently windmilling prop would produce fluctuating boost pressures on top of reduced RPM.

It was very shortly after receiving the report about “very poor” fighting qualities above 25,000 feet that Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, made his decision to keep the Whirlwind away from any fighting in the south, sealing its reputation as the fighter that missed the Battle of Britain. “The limiting factor in the present fighting against ME 109s in the South of England is the performance, manoeuvrability and climb at

high altitudes, and a difference in service ceiling of 2,000 feet is a very important advantage,” Dowding said. “It therefore seems to me quite wrong to introduce at the present time a fighter whose effective ceiling is 25,000 feet.”

Ultimately the cancellation of the Whirlwind in November 1940 was an economic decision. Rolls needed to concentrate on developing and producing Merlin and Griffon engines, and it was never too sensible (“extravagant,” as Dowding called it) to produce a fighter that required two engines to do what another might with one.

Contrary to popular belief, the Whirlwind went on to serve successfully for another three years, unaltered, in the role of a low-level strike aircraft over the English Channel and occupied France. More than one veteran has commented that they felt comfortable taking on Fw-190s in 1943 in the unmodified, undeveloped 1938 Whirlwind. Down low nothing could catch a Whirlwind. It was maneuverable, practically viceless and its pilots learned to love it.

There is little doubt that the thick blades with the wrong airfoil section held the Whirlwind back. By the time fighters were doing 420 mph and higher at altitude with two-stage superchargers and blade tip speeds of over Mach 1, the blades were very thin and had profiles that had been developed to negate compressibility completely. But by then the time had passed for the Whirlwind and the much-maligned Peregrines that powered it.

Left: The Whirlwind prototype undergoes testing in 1938 at the Royal Aircraft Establishment’s giant wind tunnel at Farnborough. Right: The prototype had different propellers from those used in the production airplanes, the reason for the drastic difference in performance at altitude.

Jack Leynnwood was one of the most prolific model box artists, producing more than 600 pieces for the Revell company. One of his best-known illustrations is the artwork for Revell’s Boeing B-17F, the famous Memphis Belle. While Leynnwood was true to the detail of the bomber itself, his painting almost makes the four-engine beast look like a dive bomber delivering its payload on target. Since that target was a workbench, the art did its job very well.

No doubt Leynnwood’s painting of Jimmy Doolittle’s North American B-25 Mitchell over Tokyo (opposite) prompted many young modelers to take that kit home, too. The box promoted an “exclusive record offer” for a 7-inch vinyl record that told the story of the Doolittle raid, but Leynnwood’s painting provided the real incentive to buy.

ARTISTS AND MODELS

AIRPLANE KITS WERE GREAT—BUT SOMETIMES THE ART ON THE BOX WAS EVEN BETTER

BY GUY ACETO

PORTFOLIO

Some of us literally built our passion for aviation at kitchen tables and basement workbenches as we carefully followed directions to create airplane replicas we could hang in aerial battle from the bedroom ceiling.

For me, it was the artwork on the model box—that painting of a favorite airplane— that could make an eight-year-old give up lawn-mowing money faster than you could ask, “Do you need glue with that?”

For the most part, the artists who created that compelling art went unsung. Commercial art is an immediate business

ARTISTS AND MODELS

Jo Kotula’s painting of a nighttime launch of a Boeing BOMARC IM-99 guided missile uses bold colors to blast off the hobby shop shelf. The original art, painted on relatively thin illustration board, measures about 26 by 30 inches. Kotula was born in Poland and came to the United States with his parents as a child. Self-taught, he found a job illustrating U.S. Air Force training manuals before creating art for the Aurora and Revell companies.

where the all-important deadline rules, and the names of many of the artists who produced captivating box art in the 1950s and ’60s have been lost. But just because commercial artists rarely see their work on gallery walls, that doesn’t mean they are any less talented than an artist being lauded at an opening in Soho. The illustrators of those model boxes did their job by captivating modelmakers with their art. Lured by the box illustrations, kids like me bought and built the kits, read the books about the airplanes we had constructed and, in some cases, found aviation turning into a lifelong obsession.

Artists like Jack Leynnwood, Jo Kotula, Roy Grinnell, John Steel and Roy Cross were only a few of the talented illustrators who produced the paintings on the outside of cardboard boxes full of plastic possibility. Collectors today seek out their original art, which can command prices well beyond what the original artist received for the work.

In these pages we offer an all-too-brief collection of some art from these overlooked masters.

John Steel served in the Marines during World War II before going to the Art Center School in Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill. He produced art for Revell, Monogram, Lindberg and Aurora. He’s better known for his dramatic paintings of destroyers and aircraft carriers, but the Nieuport 11 and Albatros D3 are just two of several World War I fighters he produced. (Notice how Aurora misspelled Albatros on the box!)

Cross had done aircraft drawings for the British Air Training Corps Gazette before doing illustrations for Fairey Aviation. He started contributing paintings for Airfix in 1964 after writing the company and saying he could improve on the art they were using. His illustration of the colossal Handley Page H.P.42 Heracles (top) shows it wasn’t an idle boast. Cross’ art for an Avro Lancaster B1 (above) depicts a typically compelling image of a battle-damaged bomber barely making it back to base—but surely it made its way up to many a cash register.

ARTISTS AND MODELS

In 1966 Aurora released two versions of General Dynamics’ new swing-wing F-111 (although the U.S. Navy never bought the carrier version of the jet, the F-111B).

Aviation artist Roy Grinnell created a pair of paintings for the two kits, both full of vibrant colors and with the airplane in full afterburner. Grinnell’s aviation art has become widely sought by collectors and has appeared in issues of Aviation History.

PROPER IDENTIFICATION

BY TOM HUNTINGTON

I love the Library of Congress. It’s a great place to do research in person, if you are lucky enough to be in Washington, D.C. There’s nothing like the experience of sitting in the Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building and gazing up into the magnificent dome high above.

FROM THE COCKPIT

But I am usually gazing into my computer screen as I use the library’s online resources to help photo editor Guy Aceto get historic photographs for Aviation History. There must be hundreds of thousands of them online. Sometimes, though, you do have to visit the physical library to download high-resolution versions. And there is one other drawback: quite often the information about the photos is lacking. For example, we recently used an LOC image of the Curtiss NC-4 (above right), the first airplane to cross the Atlantic, in the magazine’s newsletter. (Do you subscribe to the newsletter? Why not? It’s free. Just go online to historynet.com and click on “Newsletters.”) The library’s identifier for the photo-

graph was simply “Amphibious Airplane.” I once came across an image that had a similarly generic identification, something like “Seaplane on the Anacostia River.” Closer inspection revealed it to be a photograph of Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, sitting in the Lockheed Model B Sirius seaplane that they were using to make a flight to China in 1931. (The photo’s description was so obscure that I can no longer find the image, but trust me, it’s on the LOC website someplace.)

Just the other day I was looking through some photos I downloaded during a visit to the library last fall. One of them was identified by a single word—“Airplane”—and dated 1934. As I looked closer, I realized this photo (above left) showed Lt. Col. Henry “Hap” Arnold, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son, James, and a woman I assume to be James’ wife, Betsey. They are standing in front of one of the Martin B-10 bombers that Arnold was preparing to lead on an epic flight to Alaska and back in 1934. (You can read all about the flight starting on page 26.)

The image is part of the Harris & Ewing Collection, from a Washington, D.C.-based photo agency founded by George W. Harris and Martha Ewing that began operations in 1905. After the agency closed shop in 1945, it donated its photos to the library, which has around 70,000 of them. Some 41,000 are from glass negatives, like this one. (You can see that a portion of this negative had broken off.)

The point of this story is that you never know what you might find when you search for Library of Congress images. In fact, if you have time on your hands, go to the library’s website (loc.gov) and do your own search. Use any keyword you like: aviation, airplane, pilot. And if you find something really interesting, tell us about it.

Left: General Henry A. “Hap” Arnold shows off a Martin B-10 bomber to James and Betsey Roosevelt. The Library of Congress’ identification for this photo was simply “Airplane.” Above: The Curtiss NC-4 flying boat, a.k.a. “Amphibious Airplane.”

Tom Huntington

NORTH TO

One of the ten B-10s from the 1934 Alaskan flight cruises above the northern territory in an illustration by Ron Cole. Commanded by Lt. Col. Henry “Hap” Arnold, the mission was intended to add some luster to the U.S. Army Air Corps’ tarnished reputation.

TO ALASKA

IN 1934, AN OFFICER NAMED HAP ARNOLD ESTABLISHED HIMSELF AS A RISING STAR IN THE ARMY AIR CORPS BY LEADING A REMARKABLE 8,290-MILE ROUND TRIP

BY DAVE KINDY

The date was set and preparations were underway. It would be a challenging mission, especially for 1934—a roundtrip flight from Washington, D.C., to Alaska with 10 of the Army Air Corps’ newest bombers, the Martin B-10. If successful, it could provide the air service with some much-needed positive news following an airmail fiasco from the previous winter, while also providing photo-reconnaissance of what was becoming recognized as a strategically important territory.

Lt. Col. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold would lead the mission. He had been taught to fly by the Wright brothers and was one of the world’s first military pilots. Later Arnold would be remembered as “the father of the Air Force” and his leadership of this difficult assignment foretold his future as commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II. “Arnold was a visionary,” says Dik A. Daso, author of Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower and Architects of American Air Supremacy. “He had a way of seeing the technology and recognizing what it was capable of, then compelling his people to do it. You see that time and time and time again.”

The operation also focused attention on junior officers who would also play important roles in the approaching global conflict. These men—Ralph Royce, Malcolm Grow, Harold McClelland and others—flew the airplanes, led photo-reconnaissance missions, coordinated logistics and handled other key assignments. Many were later promoted to crucial commands as

Hap Arnold (standing fifth from left) was a rising star in the Army Air Corps. Flight surgeon Major Malcolm Grow stands third from left with executive officer Hugh Knerr to his left. Major Ralph Royce stands to Arnold’s left. Communications officer Harold McClelland kneels second from left.

America fought the air war across Europe and the Pacific. According to a 2011 Air Power History article by Kenneth P. Worrell, the Alaskan flight “brought together a select group of airmen who in a few short years would rise to top air force leadership roles during World War II.”

By the summer of 1934, the Army Air Corps was desperate for positive publicity. Earlier that year, a scandal had erupted over airmail contracts awarded during President Herbert H. Hoover’s administration. The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, canceled those contracts and ordered the Air Corps to fly the mail until the government negotiated new agreements with the airlines. That effort was a disaster, serving only to

expose the Air Corps’ inadequacies. Most of the aircraft it flew were antiquated World War I bombers that lacked the rudimentary communication and navigation technology necessary to deliver the mail. Much of the flying happened after dark and during the extreme weather conditions of a harsh winter. Absent adequate avionics and pilots skilled in nighttime flying, the Air Corps suffered a series of tragic mishaps. In less than two months, Army aircraft had 66 major accidents—resulting in the deaths of 13 crewmembers. By the time private carriers resumed flying the routes that spring, the Air Corps’ reputation had suffered severe damage. Congress launched an investigation and called General Benjamin Foulois, chief of the Air Corps, and Lt. Col. Oscar Westover, the assistant chief of the air wing, to testify.

To recover from the debacle, the Air Corps brass decided to undertake a daring 8,290-mile roundtrip flight from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., to Fairbanks, Alaska. In 1934, the American territory—not yet a state—seemed impossibly remote. Fairbanks was about 2,000 miles away from Seattle, Washington, and there were few transportation options to reach any point in Alaska. No highways connected this faraway land to the rest of the United States and just a few rail lines reached it via Canada. Of course, in 1934 nonstop air flights from the con tinental United States would have been difficult and dangerous.

At the time, many Americans viewed Alaska as a remote backwater with little strategic importance. One who did not was airpower advocate Billy Mitchell. In 1935, the former col onel would address Congress about the territo ry’s value. “I believe that in the future, whoever holds Alaska will hold the world,” he said. “I think it is the most important strategic place in the world.”

In addition to focusing America’s attention on Alaska, the mission would showcase the Air Corps’ newest bomber: the Martin B-10. Looking like something out of a “Flash Gordon” comic, the oddly shaped aircraft sported green house-like canopies and a bulbous nose jutting out beneath a glass-enclosed gun turret. It may have looked unusual, but the B-10 represented a revolution in aviation design. It was a huge leap forward from the Army’s existing biplane bomber, the lumbering Keystone LB series that had entered service after World War I. A mono plane with an all-metal airframe and a crew of three, the B-10 had an enclosed cockpit and rotating gun turret, and its twin 775-hp Wright

General Hap Arnold’s Journey Creating America’s Air Force , Robert Arnold, Hap Arnold’s grandson, notes the significance of the

B-10’s advances. “At last, the Air Corps had a sleek, streamlined, 200-mile-per-hour, midwing monoplane that could really get up and move,” he recalls his father, the late Col. W. Bruce Arnold of the Air Force, as saying. “By God it was metal. It had retractable landing gear. Basically, it was a junior version of the B-17 yet to come. It was the whole future of Army Air Corps aviation right there in one airplane.”

The future did take some getting used to, though. Two of the Army airplanes that crashed delivering the mail were XB-10s, accidents that happened because the pilots forgot to lower the retractable landing gear.

The plans for the Alaska trip called for 10 B-10s to make the flight, with stops in Dayton, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Canadian cities of Winnipeg, Manitoba; Regina, Saskatchewan; Edmonton, Alberta; Prince George and Hazelton, British Columbia; and Whitehorse, Yukon. Initially, Westover was sup-

posed to lead the mission, but he had to remain in Washington to deal with Congress in the wake of the airmail issues. So, in June 1934, Colonel Arnold was on his way to Wyoming for a fishing trip with his wife when he received orders to return to Washington and take charge of the Alaska flight. The last-minute notice, Arnold later commented, created “a great deal of unnecessary worry, labor and money. Months of warning should have been given to responsible authority instead of a few days.”

In some respects, Arnold was a surprising choice as commander. On one hand, he was a respected military pilot with a solid record of success as an administrator in various Air Corps departments, as well as a commander of March Field in California. Arnold had won the very first Mackay Trophy for “most outstanding military flight of the year” in 1912 for a successful air reconnaissance mission he flew despite turbulent conditions. However, he had also run afoul of military brass as an acolyte of Billy Mitchell, who had been court-martialed in 1925 after accusing his superiors of “treasonable negligence” in the management of their duties. Arnold had testified for Mitchell at the court-martial and the Army responded by angrily packing him off to a post in the backwater of Fort Riley, Kansas. In the years since, Arnold had managed to prove his worth to Foulois and Westover, who saw his value as a leader and planner.

Indeed, the new mission commander immediately found himself drawn into a maelstrom of preparation and planning. “Arnold had experience in logistics from World War I,” says Daso, who is also executive director of the Air Force Historical Foundation. “He understood that a lot of calculations needed to be made in advance. He was the intellectual power behind the logistical deployment of all the supplies they were going to need for the flight.” Those supplies included making sure there was plenty of fuel, oil, spare parts and other materiel necessities for the airplanes and crews.

Arnold soon realized the intended start date of July 10 did not leave him enough time to prepare. He postponed the takeoff date. Foulois, his boss, was not pleased. Arnold stuck to his decision, writing to his wife, Eleanor “Bee” Arnold, that “I was holding the sack with regards to safety, hazard, success and risk. I in turn told them I would not say when I would start on the flight until the planes were ready.”

The trip was complicated by a longshoremen’s strike on the West Coast, which would

Top: Arnold strikes a pose for photographers in the cockpit of the lead B-10. Above: One notice pilots saw on their instrument panels was a reminder to lower the gear before landing. Two B-10s flying the mail had come to grief because their pilots had forgotten this important step.

hinder the delivery of supplies to Alaska. Canadian rail services couldn’t handle it all, so Arnold had to arrange additional sea transport. The U.S. Navy wasn’t inclined to assist its rival branch, so the Army located an old barge that could carry half the fuel.

In the meantime, departure was delayed by the installation and testing of new radios for the B-10s. The delay was worth it because the new equipment demonstrated just how important technology was for the future of flight. “This is the first distance flight where radio contact is maintained with the ground for the entire time,” Daso says. “It’s a gamechanger in avionics.”

The original plan called for 20 officers and 10 enlisted men. Realizing the need for ongoing maintenance, Arnold changed the roster to 14 and 16, respectively. “I prefer mechanics to joy riders,” he told Westover. Also, four officers and four enlisted men would support the fliers from four Douglas O-38 observation airplanes while an advance team of four went ahead to Alaska. The B-10s received extra fuel tanks to extend their range from 1,240 miles to 1,370, and were

outfitted with cameras so they could conduct reconnaissance operations over Alaska.

The mission roster included a long list of future World War II aviation leaders. Operations officer Major Ralph Royce would go on to lead the very first bombing mission against the Japanese in the Philippines; communications and meteorological officer Captain Harold M. McClelland became known as the “father of Air Force communications”; and executive officer Major Hugh J. Knerr later ensured that U.S. forces had adequate supplies of bombs and bombers in Europe during the war. “A whole bunch of general officers pop out of this flight,” Robert Arnold says. “Typical of Hap, he begins accumulating them along the way so they can play major roles for him later.”

Arnold also added Major Malcolm Grow as flight surgeon. He wanted the experienced military doctor along to make sure the men were handling the stress of the arduous journey. In addition, Grow had served in Alaska as post surgeon at Chilkoot Barracks from 1925 to 1927. During World War II, Grow received credit for

THE MISSION ROSTER INCLUDED A LONG LIST OF FUTURE WORLD WAR II AVIATION LEADERS.

The ten B-10s wait wingtip-to-wingtip before departing from Bolling Field. The Douglas O-38 observation aircraft that will accompany the bombers are at the end of the line.

developments that helped save the lives of bomber crews, including a new lightweight body armor. He later became the first surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force.

Arnold felt confident that he would be ready for a July 19 departure from Washington, D.C. That day, after ceremonies attended by Foulois and Elliott Roosevelt, one of the president’s sons, the B-10s left Bolling Field for Alaska. With Arnold at the controls of the lead bomber, the airplanes began roaring down the runway and taking to the air at 10:01 a.m. All 10 aircraft made a pass over Washington, D.C., then headed west for Dayton for refueling before traveling to Minneapolis for the first overnight stay.

The mission encountered problems almost immediately. Two of the Martins had mechanical difficulties and turned back for repairs. They caught up with the rest of the squadron in Minnesota later that same day. The rest of the flight went according to plan, except for an added day in Edmonton that Arnold ordered so maintenance crews had plenty of time to do necessary work. The only downside, at least according to the squadron commander, were the crowds gathered at each stop to see the unusual airplanes and the men flying them. “I’m getting goodwilled to death,” Arnold wrote in a letter to his wife.

On July 24, the squadron landed in Fairbanks, where the mayor declared a two-day holiday in honor of the mission and presented Arnold with the key to the city. After a series of celebrations, the aircrews got down to the business of

The Alaskan flight flies in formation on the first day of the flight. Below: As one of Grow’s journal entries indicates, the mission ran into early difficulties when two of the airplanes experienced engine trouble. After repairs, they caught up with the rest of the flight at the first overnight in Minneapolis.

photographing Alaska from the sky. There was only one glitch during the threeweek stay in the northern territory. On August 2, two B-10s and two of the O-38 support aircraft were in Anchorage on a goodwill mission and to conduct photo reconnaissance. A pilot from one of the Douglas airplanes was at the controls of one of the bombers, which he had only flown a few times, and he turned a fuel valve in the wrong direction, causing the engines to quit on takeoff. (Arnold had committed the same error earlier in the journey, but at a higher altitude that allowed him to recover in time.) The B-10 made a forced landing about 100 feet from the shore in Cook Inlet. There was no major damage, except for immersion in the ocean. “We are salvaging the plane now,” the squadron commander wrote to Bee. “However, I doubt if the plane will ever be used again on account of the salt water bath.”

The extra mechanics Arnold brought with

him saved the day. They had the bomber back in service within a few days after salvaging it and rebuilding the engines. “They are a mighty fine bunch,” Arnold said proudly of his enlisted men.

The squadron left for the return trip on August 17, with Arnold leading the airplanes and pilots in a long flight across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle, much to the irritation of the U.S. Navy, which claimed its aircraft had jurisdiction over the seas. The team then hopped across the country, stopping at Salt Lake City, Utah; North Platte and Omaha, Nebraska; and Wright Field in Dayton before landing in Washington, D.C., on August 20.

During their stay in Alaska, the Air Corps airmen received many gifts, including a totem pole. They brought it back in one of the bombers, which nearly had to be dismantled to remove it. Alaska citizens also presented them with several sled-dog puppies, which the crews also took back with them. One of the pups made an

A PILOT TURNED A FUEL VALVE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, CAUSING THE ENGINE TO QUIT.

Some of Arnold’s mechanics work on one of the Martin’s Wright R-1820-19 engines. During planning, Arnold reduced the number of officers slotted to participate and increased the number of mechanics. “I prefer mechanics to joyriders,” he said.

One of the Martins soars over the bleak Alaskan landscape. One goal of the mission was to photograph the territory. Below: The only serious glitch came when pilot error led to a B-10 taking an unscheduled bath in Cook Inlet. Mechanics were able to get the airplane airborne within days.

unscheduled appearance at the formal return ceremony at Bolling Field. “[W]hatever military formality they had mustered disappeared quickly when a half-pint size Eskimo pup piled out of one of the big ships and broke into the crowd of officers,” reported the Washington Post.

The canine incursion notwithstanding, the mission generated plenty of positive media coverage. “This is a public success, particularly after the airmail fiasco,” Robert Arnold says. “It is a big deal. Going to Alaska in those days was like going to the moon now. Airplanes just didn’t do things like that then. Hap always said he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time.”

The flight earned Arnold a second Mackay Trophy and the Distinguished Flying Cross, which he received in 1937. Some of his pilots expressed irritation that he alone received the medal. Knerr, in particular, held it against Arnold for decades. Only much later did he learn that Arnold had lobbied for all of his pilots to receive the honor, and had even gone up the chain of command to ask Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur to award it to his men. MacArthur denied the request.

Arnold was obviously on the rise. That fall, he testified about the Alaskan flight and other issues before the Federal Aviation Commission in Washington. Toward the end of his testimony, a committee member asked him a politically sensitive question: given the chance, could Arnold “straighten out” the Air Corps? The colonel paused, then said, “If I were given the authority, I am sure that I could.”

The die had been cast. Foulois, still reeling from the airmail debacle, retired as chief of the Air Corps in 1935. His assistant, Westover, replaced him and selected the newly promoted Brig. Gen. Hap Arnold as his second-in-command. When Westover died in an airplane crash in 1938, Arnold found himself at the head of the Army Air Corps even as the world was moving inexorably toward world war. Under his leadership, the Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces) evolved from a small branch of the U.S. military into the world’s leading air power within seven years.

In many ways, the Alaskan flight set the stage for what was to come. Hap Arnold’s reputation soared after the mission demonstrated his abilities as a leader and planner at a crucial moment in history. When Arnold died in January 1950, he was (and remains) the only man to hold the

rank of five-star general in both the Army and Air Force.

“Hap was a man in a hurry and impatient,” says his grandson Robert Arnold. “He didn’t like failure but he was not a man set in cement. He talked about having character and the strength of your own convictions, but you also have to be able to see what’s going on and be able to adapt. That’s what made him different.”

Massachusetts writer and author Dave Kindy is a frequent contributor to Aviation History and other HistoryNet publications, as well as Air & Space Quarterly, the Washington Post and National Geographic . For further reading, he recommends Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower by Dik A. Daso and “Flight to the Stars: The 1934 Air Corps Alaskan Expedition” by Kenneth P. Worrell, published in the Fall 2011 issue of Air Power History

Top: Secretary of War George Dern congratulates Arnold at Bolling Field after completion of the mission while an Alaskan totem pole and some sled-dog puppies take advantage of the photo opportunity. Above: The only surviving example of the Martin B-10 is in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

THE RAF’S LAST BIPLANE

THE STORY OF THE GLOSTER GLADIATOR HAS BECOME A MIXTURE OF FACT AND FANCY

BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

A 1937 Gloster Gladiator from England’s Shuttleworth Collection was restored to resemble the airplane flown at prewar airshows by future World War II ace Edgar “Cobber” Kain. Like many pilots, the New Zealander transitioned to the more modern Hawker Hurricane early in the war as the days of biplane fighters drew to a close. Kain scored 14 victories before being killed in June 1940.

37 AUTUMN 2023

Roald Dahl was not an admirer of the Gloster Gladiator. “They have taut canvas wings, covered with magnificently inflammable dope, and underneath there are hundreds of small thin sticks, the kind you put under the logs for kindling, only these are drier and thinner,” wrote Dahl, the British novelist and short-story writer, creator of Willy Wonka and a Gloster Gladiator pilot himself. “If a clever man said, ‘I am going to build a big thing that will burn better and quicker than anything else in the world,’ and if he applied himself diligently to his task, he would probably finish up by building something very like a Gladiator.”

Dahl’s understanding of his airplane’s structure was lacking, since its wings were all metal, but he nearly died in a flaming crash of his own Gladiator in the North African desert, so we’ll give him some leeway.

The Gladiator—it had no nickname, was never called the Gladdy or the Blazing Breadbox—was the last British biplane fighter, an anomaly that the Air Ministry clung to out of both necessity and romanticism. As an aerobatic plaything for the finest flying club in the world—the boys of the RAF’s Volunteer Reserve prewar university squadrons at Cambridge and Oxford— there was no lovelier airplane.

Left top: The prototype Gladiator had an open cockpit when it first flew in September 1934. Left bottom: The Gladiator replaced Gloster’s Gauntlet. Improvements included changes in landing gear and the removal of some struts and wires.

In the 1930s, the RAF was lumbered with slow, draggy, open-cockpit biplane fighters like the Hawker Fury and Bristol Bulldog, which could trace their lineage to World War I. But relief was in sight: already under development were “the monoplane fighters,” which we now know as the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. They were a reaction to the threat of what would become one of the finest pistonengine fighters of all time—Germany’s Messerschmitt Me-109. But “development” was another way of saying, “maybe next year…or two.” Something was needed in the interim.

The company that built the Gladiator was called Gloster. (Initially it was the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company, until the Brits found that foreigners were pronouncing it “Glau-cessder-shyer.” So they invented the briefer phonetic title.) It seems odd that Gloster created something so antediluvian as the Gladiator, for its very next design was the first British jet, the tubby little E28/39 Whittle-engine testbed. After that Gloster designed the only RAF jet to see combat in World War II, the Meteor.

The Gladiator’s designer was engineer Henry Philip Folland, who would eventually found his own aircraft company, best known today for the Folland Gnat light fighter and trainer that once served with the RAF Red Arrows display team. Folland had been the lead designer of the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5, which was so fast and successful in combat that it is sometimes called the Spitfire of World War I. He went on to design several of the Gladiator’s predecessors—the Grebe, Gamecock and Gauntlet. With his Schneider Trophy contender, the Gloster IV float biplane, he acquired a reputation as a drag-deleting expert. With the Gladiator, Folland brought the biplane fighter to the pinnacle of prewar excellence.

In 1930, the Air Ministry had issued a specification—what the U.S. would call a request for proposals—and they got a dozen relatively advanced biplane candidates, at least on paper. Unfortunately, the spec had urged the use of the Rolls-

Future author Roald Dahl, shown here during his flight training in Kenya, flew Gladiators and nearly died in one, surviving he said, “only by the skin of my teeth.”

Before the war, RAF Gladiators wowed airshow audiences by flying in close formation while “chained” together. The breakaway “chains” are visible in this image.

Although outdated, Gladiators served around the world. Top: Gladiators of the RAF’s No. 33 Squadron kick up dust in Ismailia, Egypt. Above: A member of a Finnish groundcrew adjusts a Gladiator’s Browning machine guns. In 1943 a Finnish Gladiator became the last to score a victory.

Royce Goshawk engine, a V-12 design that used evaporative cooling rather than straightforward liquid cooling. The theory was that having an engine turn its coolant into steam removed more heat than simply having it make hot water hotter. Maybe so, but the Goshawk turned out to be a lousy engine. For one thing, the cooling system didn’t work during high-G maneuvers. Nor did it help that steam cooling required a large condensing radiator atop the upper wing to turn the steam back into liquid. If a single rifle-cali-

ber round punctured that, it could easily down the airplane.

Gloster had wisely steered clear of the Goshawk and instead worked on a private venture, upgrading its already-successful Gauntlet biplane fighter. The Gauntlet had a Bristol Jupiter nine-cylinder radial, but Bristol did a bit of engineering and turned the Jupiter into the very successful Mercury engine by shortening its stroke an inch and thus reducing the circumference of the engine, meaning less frontal-area drag. It also meant less power, but Bristol dealt with that by doing an unusual thing. Supercharged aircraft engines use their blowers to maintain sea-level power as altitude increases, but Bristol decided to give the Mercury some extra power by ground-boosting it—tuning the supercharger to work even at sea level. The Mercury also had four valves per cylinder— unusual for a radial.

In an attempt to reach the 250-mph top speed then beloved of the Air Ministry, Gloster strengthened the main spars and changed the biplane configuration from a two-bay design— two sets of interplane struts on each side of the fuselage—to a single-bay configuration. Eliminating four big struts and their yards of cables and rigging cleaned up the airplane substantially, as did simplifying the draggy landing gear. Straightforward Stearman-like Dowty dampers enclosed in nicely faired wooden legs were far cleaner than the multi-strutted Gauntlet design.

The one thing that clearly turned a Gauntlet into a Gladiator, however, was a fully enclosed cockpit with a sliding canopy—the first on any RAF fighter. Yet many photos of Gladiators in flight show that canopy slid wide open. Like early airline pilots who decried the Ford Trimotor because its enclosed cockpit kept them from feeling the wind on their cheeks (which is how, they claimed, it was possible to make coordinated turns), experienced RAF pilots felt constrained by a canopy. It limited

GLADIATOR MK.I

PILOTED BY ARTHUR CHIN

GLADIATOR MK.II 94TH SQUADRON, RAF

their visibility, they said, and insulated them from their proper milieu. One Gladiator pilot claimed that he had tracked a bogey for miles before realizing that it was a fly strolling around the inside of his canopy. Nor did it help that a Gladiator’s cockpit often filled with engine fumes that needed to be blown away.

The canopy wasn’t the only Gladiator innovation that met with disapproval. The big biplane was the first British fighter to utilize flaps, though they were intended solely for landing. They were small but deployed from both sets of wings, so their total area was meaningful. Many old-timers wouldn’t touch them, complaining that they upset the airplane’s trim. Perhaps they felt that using the big pitch-trim wheel just to the left of the pilot’s seat was not their job.

The Gladiator prototype flew in September 1934 but did not enter service with the RAF until early 1937, and by then the RAF had already ordered its first Hurricanes, signaling the biplane’s impending obsolescence. Those early Mk.I Gladiators came armed with World War I Vickers and Lewis machine guns—two of the former in the fuselage sidewalls firing through the prop, plus a Lewis under each lower wing. The old .303-caliber popguns often jammed the instant the trigger was activated. Savvy Gladiator pilots carried rubber mallets with which to pound on the Vickers breeches, which extended back into the cockpit. Why did aircraft guns jam so often back then? There were many rea-

sons, but perhaps the most meaningful one is that machine guns were designed to operate in an upright, stable, 1G ground environment, often carefully belt-fed by second gunner. Bolt them onto a vibrating, cavorting, G-loaded airplane, and all of the finely machined sliding and rotating parts inside the breech get minutely twisted and racked by an airplane’s maneuvers and position. Nobody designed those guns to fire upside-down or sideways. A partial solution was to replace all four British guns with somewhat more modern Colt Brownings manufactured under license by Birmingham Small Arms, the company that went on to produce the classic BSA motorcycles of the 1950s.

The guns “actually fired bullets through the revolving propeller,” marveled Roald Dahl. “To me, this was about the greatest piece of magic I had ever seen in my life. I could simply not understand how two machine guns firing thousands of bullets could be synchronized to fire their bullets through a propeller revolving at thousands of revs a minute without hitting the

In Norway, wrecked RAF Gladiators of No. 263 Squadron offer mute evidence of the airplanes’ futile effort to counter the German offensive in the spring of 1940.

GLADIATOR MK.II

ROYAL NORWEGIAN AIR FORCE

SEA GLADIATOR NO. 802 NAVAL AIR SQUADRON

propeller blades. I was told that it had something to do with a little oil pipe and that the propeller shaft communicated with the machine guns by sending pulses along the pipe, but more than that I cannot tell you.”

More than that one does not need, and it is a satisfying explanation, unlike the usual muttering about “interrupter gears.” Dahl, never a technologist, managed to give as brief and useful a description of gun/prop synchronization as one can imagine.

The Gladiator’s career was too short to allow for many variants to be developed, so there were only three near-identical versions of the airplane. The original Mk.I had an 840-hp Bristol Mercury driving a fat two-blade, fixed-pitch wooden prop, and the Mk.II received a more efficient three-blade metal prop, plus the Browning guns. The Royal Navy found itself without a fleet-defense fighter, so it got the Sea Gladiator. It had a strengthened tailcone and A-frame arrestor hook, and a pod holding an inflatable raft on its belly between the mainwheel struts, activated by a cable in the cockpit.

The dinghy pod was well-located, since a ditched Gladiator would turn turtle the instant its landing gear hit the water, but it was asking a lot of a drowning and upside-down pilot to free himself from a flooded cockpit while remembering to find and pull the raft cable.

Gladiators had some tricky handling qualities, exacerbated by pilots unfamiliar with its relatively high wing loading and flapped landings. During the airplane’s introduction to squadron service, the accident rate was appalling. A brisk stall often led to a spin, which would go flat and become unrecoverable in unskilled hands. During combat maneuvering, Gladiators sometimes spun out of the fight (which might have been a good thing, considering some of its monoplane opponents). Intentional spinning at night was forbidden, and it probably should have been during daylight as well.

Still, the Gladiator was wonderfully aerobatic and became a popular air-display act during its brief late-1930s career when a trio of Gladiators flew formation maneuvers while “chained together” at the wingtips, in the words of one

Somewhere in Britain, RAF pilots scramble to their Gladiators. The RAF tried to keep its Gladiators away from the Luftwaffe’s much superior Me-109.

ONE OF CHIN’S VICTORIES INVOLVED RAMMING A CLAUDE AND THEN BAILING OUT FROM HIS WRECKED AIRPLANE.

commentator. The chains were actually far more frangible tethers with breakaway fittings.

Dahl had his own concerns about flying the Gladiator, and he wondered, “Who will teach me to fly it? ‘Don’t be an ass [said his squadron commander]. How can anyone teach you when there’s only one cockpit? Just get in and do a few circuits and bumps and you’ll soon get the hang of it. You had better get all the practice you can because the next thing you know you’ll be dicing in the air with some clever little Italian who will be trying to shoot you down.’”

The Gladiator’s wartime career was necessarily brief and, despite some mythmaking, largely ineffectual. Not surprising, since there were few less-capable fighters in action, and all of Germany’s and Italy’s bombers easily outpaced it. The RAF usually sent Gladiators to war zones normally out of reach of Luftwaffe Me-109s. Only one Gladiator squadron participated in the Battle of Britain, and it was stationed in the southwest of England to protect the ports of Plymouth and Falmouth, which were beyond the range of German fighters. Its only contribution to that conflict was the interception of a force of Dornier Do-17 bombers and Messerschmitt Me-110 escorts at the end of September 1940. The Germans were too fast for the Gladiators, and two of the Dorniers bombed Plymouth unchecked. Though Gladiators notched victories against Italian Macchi C.200 and French Dewoitine D.520 monoplanes, there is no record of a Gladiator shooting down an Me-109.

The first Gladiator victory had already been scored by an American, Captain John “Buffalo” Wong, one of the 15 volunteers who flew for the Chinese against the Japanese more than two years before Claire Chennault formed the shortlived American Volunteer Group. In February 1938, Wong shot down an A5M Claude, the fixedgear, open-cockpit predecessor of the Zero. (Some records credit him with two Claudes.)

Wong’s Chinese American squadronmate Arthur Chin became an ace, with eight victories before the U.S. even entered the war, and 6.5 of them were with the Gladiator. Chin receives credit as the first U.S. ace of World War II. One of his Gladiator victories involved ramming a Claude and then bailing out from his wrecked airplane. The apocryphal story is that he

Top: A South African, Marmaduke Thomas St. John “Pat” Pattle (left, with Flt. Lt. George Rumsey) scored his first victories in the Gladiator. Above left: Arthur Chin flew Gladiators against the Japanese in China. Above right: As commander of the RAF’s No. 80 Squadron in Libya, Gladiator pilot Patrick “Paddy” Dunn tangled with Italian CR.42s.

The story of the Sea Gladiators that defended Malta in June 1940 has become a mix of legend and reality. Here the fuselage of the airplane known as Faith is officially presented to the people of Malta by Air Marshal Sir Keith Park at a ceremony that took place in Valletta in September 1943.

stripped a machine gun from the wreckage of his Gladiator and showed it to Chennault, then an aviation advisor to the Chinese, and asked if he could please have another Gladiator to go with it.

The ultimate Gladiator pilot was Flt. Lt. Marmaduke Thomas St. John “Pat” Pattle, a South African who scored at least 15 victories with Gladiators, first in Egypt and later in Greece. (The rest of his 50-plus shoot-downs were accomplished with Hurricanes.) “Usually outrun, often outgunned but seldom outmaneuvered,” reads one tribute to Pattle, arguably the most skilled and dogged of all Gladiator pilots.

Gladiators fought in the hands of a wide variety of export customers as well as the RAF, and they reached many war zones, including North Africa, Greece, the Middle East, France and Scandinavia. The Norway campaign was one of the Gladiator’s bloodiest battles, and for the RAF, it was a disaster.

A squadron of Gladiators flew to Norway from the carrier HMS Glorious to help blunt the German invasion in late April 1940, and they surprised the Germans by landing on a frozen lake in the country’s center. (The lake had been selected by Sqdn. Ldr. Whitney Straight, an American racecar driver who in the years before the war had won more international Grand Prix than any other American.) The Gladiators

arrived without support personnel, and the pilots found themselves rearming and refueling their airplanes themselves with bitterly cold hands, often using milk cans supplied by local farmers for the fuel. The Luftwaffe reacted quickly with bombing raids, and the lake, already thawing in the spring weather, became increasingly cratered and unstable. After 48 hours of this, the Gladiators were finished as a fighting force, burnt out on the ground and sunk into the boggy water. The squadron hadn’t shot down a single Luftwaffe aircraft. The Air Ministry admitted that the Gladiators had been sent to Norway “as a token sacrifice.”

The squadron received another 18 Gladiators and returned to Norway, this time to an established airfield. They scored several victories over Heinkel 111s and possibly even a Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. Ultimately, what remained of the squadron flew back to the Glorious , despite the Gladiators having no arresting hooks nor any pilots who had made deck landings. Soon after the carrier sailed, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank it and all but two of the Gladiator pilots aboard. It was the end of the Gladiator’s Norwegian adventure.

Nobody can write an account of the Gladiator’s career without extolling the feats of the most famous of all Gladiators, the six airplanes that went by the names of Faith, Hope and Charity Starting in June 1940 they defended the Mediterranean island of Malta against the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, and unfortunately, their story has become a mix of legend and reality. There were no individual Gladiators named Faith, Hope or Charity, and the honorific was applied to the entire flight of fighters by a Maltese newspaper well after the island had been saved from defeat, largely by Hurricanes and Spitfires. (The remains of a Gladiator on display at Malta’s National War Museum purports to be from Faith.)

Yet the Malta Gladiators were immensely reassuring to the Maltese as the biplanes stood watch from dawn to dusk and frequently barreled off to intercept incoming SavoiaMarchettis and Capronis. The only way they could attack the bombers was to climb above them and pick up speed in a dive, so they snarled their way upward, full throttle and supercharg-

ers set to max (officially forbidden). Their high-angle, low-forward-speed climbs overheated and destroyed their engines, but to the Maltese, they were brave pit bulls lunging to the ends of their chains.

It’s often forgotten that, not counting trainers, there were at least two dozen types of biplanes used on the front lines during World War II. Everyone remembers the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber—the Stringbag—but other biplane fighters included Polikarpov I-15s, Avia B-534s, Hawker Furies and particularly Fiat CR.42 Falco biplanes, the Gladiator’s most evenly matched rival.

The Falco was in fact a sesquiplane, not a biplane; it had lower wings of less than half the area of the upper wing. It also had an open cockpit and fixed landing gear, yet it was about 15 mph faster than the Gladiator. The Gloster was more maneuverable than the Italian fighter, particularly in a turning fight. The Gladiator’s biggest advantage was that it carried a radio with about five miles of air-to-air range, allowing coordinated attacks while the Italian pilots could only gesture and nod their heads.

Gladiators had a 1.2-to-1 victory ratio over CR.42s—much the same as the Me-109’s advantage over the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain: close enough to call it even.

After the war, Gladiators were essentially worthless. British collector Vivian Bellamy bought two hulks for a pound sterling apiece in

Top: Faith was one of the Sea Gladiators that became immortalized as “Faith, Hope and Charity ” after the defense of Malta. Above: Their main adversaries were Italian CR.42 Falcos of the Regia Aeronautica. It was a good match: The Italian sesquiplane, like the Gladiator, was also obsolete by the time World War II began.

1951 and created a single flyable airplane, which he sold to the Gloster company for £50. That airplane was later restored and today is part of the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, England. It is one of only two flying Gladiators remaining. In September 2021, the Malta Aviation Museum announced plans to create a flyable replica built around one small part salvaged from what they claim was the sunken Gladiator Charity, but that project seems to be in limbo.

The Gloster Gladiator: honor this cranky and archaic yet iconic and innovative fighter, but offer a prayer for all the pilots who had to go into combat with it.

Stephan Wilkinson is Aviation History ’s contributing editor. For further reading he recommends The Gloster Gladiator by Francis K. Mason and Faith, Hope and Charity: The Defence of Malta by Kenneth Poolman.

THE BOMBING OF UAL TRIP 23

IN 1933, COMMERCIAL AVIATION

EXPERIENCED A TRAGIC FIRST

BY STEVE WARTENBERG

At 2:10 p.m. on October 10, 1933, Emil Smith sent a telegram to the aunt with whom he lived in Chicago.

“Leaving New York today by plane,” it read.

“Everything O.K.” Approximately two hours later, Smith boarded United Air Lines Trip 23 in Newark, New Jersey. The twin-engine Boeing 247, tail number 13304, was headed to Cleveland, where it would refuel and take on a new crew of pilots. Then it was on to Chicago, and from there to the airplane’s final destination of Oakland. Smith had a ticket for Chicago and he carried a small package, wrapped in brown paper, that he kept close to him over the next few hours—the final hours of his life.

Smith and his fellow passengers never made it to Chicago. Just before 9:00 p.m., United Air Lines Trip 23 exploded over Chesterton, Indiana, as it approached Chicago’s Municipal Airport, killing all seven people aboard. Considered the first time a bomb had destroyed a commercial airline flight, the crash became the subject of an intense investigation by the

U.S. Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the FBI). Overseen by director J. Edgar Hoover and led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis (who would later gain fame leading the manhunts for gangsters George “Baby Face” Nelson, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd and John Dillinger), agents interviewed hundreds of people from Newark and New York to San Francisco. The interviewees even included a young, upand-coming attorney who would twice win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president two decades later.

Theories for the crash included tail flutter, a meteor strike, a faulty fuel line and sabotage by a disgruntled United pilot upset about the contentious negotiations between the pilots and the

Boeing 247 NC 13304 was blown out of the sky on October 10, 1933. An in-depth investigation sought to find the culprit.

airline for increased pay. Those theories fell by the wayside once forensic analysis of the wreckage determined the real cause of the crash: a “high explosive” bomb had exploded near the rear of the airplane, ripping the Boeing in half. Emil Smith soon emerged as the prime suspect. What was in the package he clung to so tightly? Why was he in New York?

As time passed and every lead led to a dead end, Hoover grew increasingly frustrated. His agents eventually compiled a report that exceeded 300 pages (and was declassified by the FBI in 2017). No arrests were ever made and, 90 years later, the bombing of United Air Lines Trip 23 remains one of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries.

Joe Groff said he was “dealing in a game of hearts with some neighboring farmers shortly before 9 o’clock last night when we heard an explosion,” according to United Press story from October 11, 1933. Groff ran to a window and “saw a big airplane coming down. Flames appeared to be shooting out from it.”

Groff and the other card-playing farmers ran toward the Boeing 247. The wreckage was engulfed in flames that leaped 100 feet high into the night sky. “We stood there in the rain and watched, helpless,” Groff said. “There was nothing we could do. There was no sign of life about the plane.” The airplane continued to burn for more than two hours.

The doomed airliner either takes on or unloads cargo in a publicity photo. Investigators determined that the bomb that destroyed the airplane had been placed in the blanket compartment near the lavatory, just forward of the mail express door.

Fred Rhode had a farm nearby. He too ran toward the crash site “but you couldn’t get near the wreckage, the heat was so bad,” he told the Times newspaper of Hammond, Indiana. Hundreds of pieces of the fuselage were scattered across a field and, according to the Times, “one of the charred victims, a woman, was decapitated. Arms and legs, now only burned stumps, added a gruesome touch to the tragedy.”

The initial explosion split the airplane in two and “the tail section of the plane fell about onehalf mile from the scene of the crash, almost intact,” according to United Air Lines Vice President D.B. Colyer. He said the plane was traveling at about 150 miles per hour when it hit the ground, igniting the remaining gasoline in the airplane’s tanks. “He believes that the impact burst the gasoline tanks and the heat from the fire caused the air in the tires of the wheels to explode,” agents reported. (Colyer theorized that “gasoline escaping from the feed lines may have flowed along the metal body of the plane to the rear section, where it attained a mixture of air and was explosed [sic] by ignition or friction.”)

The bodies of pilot Richard Tarrant and copilot A.T. Ruby were found near the airplane’s main section. The bodies of stewardess Alice Scribner and passengers Dorothy Dwyer and Fred Schendorf were badly burned and found in the wreckage of the cabin.

Dwyer had been scheduled to take an earlier flight from Newark, with a final destination in Reno, Nevada, where she had planned to marry

MAIL EXPRESS BAGGAGE

Stanley Baldwin. However, Dwyer missed her connecting flight from Boston and “for this reason she was on the plane that left at 4:30 p.m.,” according to the Bureau of Investigation report. Scribner, a nurse (a qualification to be a stewardess at the time) had recently been hired by United. Her fiancé, Evan Terp, was waiting for her at the airport in Chicago. Schendorf was a businessman from Chicago.

The bodies of Smith and Warren Burris weren’t found until daybreak the following morning, in the weeds about half a mile from the main section of the plane. They had either been blown out of the plane after the explosion or had jumped. Burris was a United employee who was being shuttled from Cleveland to Chicago.

People came from miles around to view the crash, and several picked up pieces of the airplane or its contents as souvenirs. “Mr. Purvis further advised that the Agents are trying to collect parts of the plane picked up by souvenir hunters,” Hoover wrote on October 13.

A day after the crash, United issued a statement reported in the New York Post: “The accident marked the first passenger fatality in a multi-motored plane in the United Air Lines’ experience. The company has flown approximately 40,000,000 miles with multi-motored planes, without previous passenger fatalities. We are strongly of the opinion that the plane did not explode in the air….”

Inspectors with the Aeronautic Branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce told agents a phenomenon called “tail flutter” could have been responsible for the airplane splitting in two. They described it as a vibration of the tail that eventually “wears down the resistance of the body until finally at the time of some strain these parts disintegrate.” There was a precedent for the flutter theory. Back on March 31, 1931, a Transcontinental and Western Air Fokker F-10 had crashed near Bazaar, Kansas, killing all eight people aboard, including legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. Investigators were able to determine that a spar in the plane’s all-wooden wings had broken. This created uncontrolled flutter in the wing, which caused one of the wings to tear away from the body of the aircraft.

Forensic science was still in its early stages in 1933 and the Bureau of Investigation did not have its own agents trained in this emerging field. It brought in investigators from the Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University in Chicago to examine the wreckage. In a letter dated October 14, the laboratory’s Dr. C.W. Muehlberger wrote, in his initial report to Purvis, that the cause of the crash was an explosion produced by “a ‘high explosive’ of the type of nitroglycerin, dynamite of high percentage strength, TNT, or some similar substance.” He said the explosion occurred toward the airplane’s rear, in the upper portion of the lavatory or in the blanket compartment built into an upper section of the bathroom compartment. The opening to the blanket compartment was in the rear of main cabin.

Now that agents knew the cause of the explosion, they began to focus on finding out who placed it aboard the plane, their motive and how the bomb was detonated. The answers to these questions proved elusive.

Smith and his package immediately aroused suspicions. He had been in New York in the days before the crash, ensconced at the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street and Madison Avenue. Family members in Chicago reported he was in New York to watch the World Series. The Giants had beaten the Washington Senators in five games, with the series-clinching game on October 7 taking place at Griffith Stadium in Washington. There was no evidence Smith attended either of the games played at the Polo Grounds in New York on October 3 and 4, nor was a definitive timeline established on when he arrived in the city and what he did there.

According to United employees interviewed by agents, Smith took a pint bottle of liquor out of his bag at the Newark airport. He was about to take a drink when a porter advised him it was not allowed. “Smith reluctantly replaced the bottle in the handbag,” the porter said. Then Smith went to the bathroom, leaving his bag on a chair in the waiting room. When he returned from the bathroom, Smith “opened the bag and extracted therefrom a package wrapped in brown paper, which he stated…he would carry.” The package was “about the ordinary length of a shoe.”

Baggage handlers placed his luggage in the forward baggage compartment and Smith carried his package onto the plane. When the plane stopped to refuel in Cleveland, he initially didn’t

The Boeing 247 had room for 10 passengers, but only four were flying aboard Trip 23. All four, and the three crewmembers, died in the crash.

want to leave his seat. A passenger agent “instructed Miss Scribner to inform Smith that he should leave the plane while it refueled” and also reported that Smith removed the package from the “parcel holder over his head” and carried it with him as he walked through the Cleveland airport. Informed that Smith had attempted to carry a bottle of liquor aboard the flight in Newark, the passenger agent tried to determine if he was drunk. “Smith seemed

entirely sober and normal and no liquor could be smelled on his breath or about his person,” the agent reported.

Agents explored every aspect of Smith’s seemingly ordinary life. An Army veteran who been stationed in Hawaii during World War I, Smith, 44, lived with his aunt, Anna Reidl, on Argyle Street in Chicago. He was a bachelor and had owned and operated a grocery business with Reidl until they sold it in 1930. Smith was “comfortably situated” after the sale and spent his time hunting, fishing and attending baseball games. Reidl told agents Smith lived with her because “his people” didn’t approve of his idle ways and wanted him to find a job. Reidl described her nephew as “very quiet” and said he would “often come in the evenings and play pinochle with her, or would take her on hunting trips with him.”

Prohibition was still in effect, and Purvis received a tip that Smith had been in New York in connection with a “rum boat” and had been heard to say that if “this deal went through he would be fixed for life.” However, no evidence was ever found connecting Smith with bootleggers in New York.

On October 9, Smith bought a $47.95 ticket for the flights from Newark to Cleveland and on to Chicago at the ticket desk in his hotel. He also purchased a flight insurance policy for $2. It was good for the day only and would have paid $10,000 to Smith’s estate.

Robert Dawson was the United pilot who flew the plane from Newark to Cleveland. He told agents that about 30 minutes before landing, he had walked back into the cabin and talked to Smith, who was sitting in Seat No. 3. “He asked Smith how he was enjoying the trip and Smith replied that he was enjoying it very much.”

United’s D.B. Colyer revised his opinion and said that an explosion in the air had indeed caused the crash and he pointed the finger at Smith. He told agents that “Smith may have been carrying some explosive in the form of nitro-glycerine.”

Eventually the investigation concluded that Smith “was a reputable citizen.” They could not establish a motive or find evidence that he had carried a bomb onto the airplane.

Agents across the country explored every possible lead and theory.

A United Press reporter called an agent and said he’d received information the crash was an attempt to “get” Joseph Keenan, an assistant attorney general with the U.S.

Top: Some visitors to the crash site took pieces of the airplane as grisly souvenirs, forcing investigators to retrieve what could have been clues to the accident’s cause. Above: Press coverage provided details of the victims and their families.

Department of Justice who was investigating organized crime. Keenan had flown with United a few days before the crash. “I did not see how this rumor could have any truth,” the agent wrote.

On November 3, 1933, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a story titled “Hunt Gangster for Murder of Seven in Plane.” The article claimed that agents of the Department of Justice “expect soon to arrest a gangster and charge him,” although “the identity of the gangster was not disclosed.” Purvis reported to Hoover that the story was “made up by the newspaper.”

Several agents investigated the possibility that a disgruntled pilot was responsible. A United vice president said he had been informed indirectly that if the airline used “scab” pilots during the dispute “they would find their planes would be damaged.” The brother of copilot A.T. Ruby told agents his brother “had been having a great deal of trouble with certain individuals who were members of the Pilot’s Union.” Agents in the Detroit office of the Bureau of Investigation interviewed Wharton Larned, the United pilot who had allegedly threatened Ruby. Larned “answered all questions frankly and apparently honestly,” agents reported, and he was ruled out as a suspect. Agents also determined that by the time of the crash “all talk of a strike had blown over and there was no indication of dissatisfaction of any employees or pilots….” No evidence of sabotage by a United employee was found. Another dead end.

The Bureau’s Chicago office even received a letter from an employee of an Argentinian importing and exporting company based in Cleveland suggesting that a meteor had struck the airplane. The letter said that meteors “travelling in the upper space at velocities approaching 30 miles per second in reaching the atmosphere are heated by friction to about 3500 degrees C.…” The Bureau ruled out meteors.

Several passengers on United flights in the days preceding the crash of the Trip 23 flight were interviewed to determine if they had observed any suspicious activities. One of these passengers was Adlai Stevenson, then the chief attorney with the Federal Alcohol Control Administration. He had flown from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland and then Chicago on October 8. “Mr. Stevenson stated that he did not notice anything out of the ordinary on his trip…and that the plane carried eight or ten passengers, besides the two pilots and the hostess.” Decades later, Stevenson would run as the Democratic candidate for president, losing both times to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The investigation continued into 1934. Lead after lead went nowhere. “I think that this investigation should continue and the facts be presented to the proper U.S. Attorney,” assistant attorney general Keenan wrote on January 17 in a memorandum to Hoover. By the end of the year the investigation appeared hopelessly stalled. On December 12, Purvis wrote to Hoover that “further interviews with other passengers will reveal no new additional information beneficial to the investigation, and authority is requested, therefore, to close this case in the files of the Chicago office.”

Hoover wrote back, telling Purvis he “desires that a careful review of the file in this case be made and leads set out, with the view of developing further facts pertinent to this investigation.” Hoover sent similar letters to agents in other offices.

Agents in the San Francisco office interviewed J.J. Lavin, an American working for the Chinese Consul in San Francisco who helped oversee the delivery to China of wheat purchased in the United States. He had been scheduled to fly on the ill-fated flight but rescheduled to a later one. Lavin had been overheard saying a bomb caused the crash, supposedly before

this information had been reported in newspapers. Lavin told the agents that “he does not recall discussing the matter with anyone, although [he] admitted while under the influence of liquor he may possibly have discussed the matter with various people.”

The investigation continued well into 1935 without any breakthroughs.

On September 20, 1935, Hoover sent a memorandum to Keenan. All “undeveloped leads in this case have been exhausted, and the investigation has not developed any facts which would justify presenting this matter to the United States Attorney. Therefore, this case is being closed.” The crash of United Air Lines Trip 23 remains unsolved.

Steve Wartenberg is a freelance writer based in Columbus, Ohio. A former newspaper reporter, Wartenberg has written several books. For further reading, he recommends the case file, which can be found online by going to vault.fbi.gov and searching for “1933 crash.”

J. Edgar Hoover (right), the head of the Bureau of Investigation, took a personal interest in the case. The agent in charge was Melvin Purvis (left), later famous for taking down noted gangsters.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

THE DOUGLAS MIXMASTER HAD PROPELLERS; THE JETMASTER HAD NONE

BY DAVID W. TEMPLE

On December 16, 1945, test pilot Lt. Col. Fred J. Ascani and two friends from his days at West Point took off from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., in an experimental bomber, the Douglas XB-42. The second example built of the unconventional airplane, the XB-42 had set a transcontinental speed record just eight days earlier. Ascani’s flight was supposed to be just a routine test flight, but it proved anything but routine. Within 45 minutes of takeoff, the airplane lay in a crumpled mass in a Maryland field.

The propeller-driven XB-42 Mixmaster and its derivative, the jet-powered XB-43 Jetmaster, were two of many experimental military aircraft tested during the 1940s that failed to meet expectations, despite innovative designs. Nonetheless, both aircraft are notable in aviation history. The XB-42 demonstrated new ideas in streamlining, was the first pusher-type bomber to reach the flight-test stage and, most

Bottom: The first Douglas XB-42 displays its unusual characteristics in flight. Inset: The crew could jettison the airplane’s twin rear-mounted propellers if they needed to bail out. The propellers were also the reason for the airplane’s nickname: Mixmaster.

The XB-42’s two three-bladed props were counter-rotating and spun in arcs about 13 feet in diameter. The plane’s ventral stabilizer, equipped with a shock-absorbing oleo strut and a skid, kept the propellers from striking the runway on takeoff.

importantly, led directly to the first American jet-powered bomber to be built and tested.

Douglas developed the Mixmaster as a testbed for a high-speed, long-range bombardment airplane with improved performance, and the company intended to use the project for research on reducing drag and providing better propulsion. To do that, the company decided to develop a medium bomber that met specifications from the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), including a top speed of 400 mph at a time when USAAF bombers topped out at roughly 300 mph. When Edward F. Burton, Douglas’s chief of engineering, took charge of the project he began with a “clean sheet of paper” rather than attempting refinements of conventional norms. The result was a unique aircraft.

The design Burton settled on, the Model 459, was a mid-wing, all-metal airplane with laminar-flow wings and pusher propellers in the rear of the fuselage. It had a maximum gross take-off and landing weight of 35,000 pounds and could carry up to 8,000 pounds of bombs. By concealing the engines within the fuselage and placing the props in the rear, the design reduced weight

and drag that would have come with wingmounted engines and their nacelles. Drag was estimated to be 70 percent of that of a conventional twin-engine, tractor-type airplane and the maximum speed for the XB-42 at sea level, with a normal fuel load of 650 pounds and a gross weight of 33,206 pounds, was calculated as 344 mph. At 23,800 feet, the first prototype was projected to peak at 410 mph. Its range at 10,000 feet was 1,840 miles, though a reduction in the standard bomb load along with additional fuel would increase the range up to 5,400 miles.

To power the Mixmaster, Douglas chose a pair of side-by-side mounted Allison V-1710s. The liquid-cooled engines were already being used by airplanes such as the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Each engine had a variable-speed, auxiliary-stage supercharger, automatically controlled by manifold pressure, and turned a coaxial prop. Long shafts extended from the engines to a reduction gear box installed on flexible mounts.

Douglas wanted the props to be independently driven and automatically controlled and to have a reversible pitch feature to shorten the landing distance and prevent too high a speed in a dive. They also wanted the propellers and gear box to be jettisonable so the crew could safely bail out without danger from the rearmounted propellers. When the XB-42 was in the design stage, no propeller existed with the desired characteristics. The propeller division of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in Caldwell, New Jersey, in conjunction with Acrotorque Company of Stamford, Connecticut, offered a jettisonable “stop gap” propeller system with electric pitch control and a jettison system while working on the desired “ultimate propeller,” though work on it was eventually canceled.

The XB-42’s pusher system was unconventional for a bomber, and so was its defensive armament. Burton gave the airplane a set of rear-facing twin .50-caliber machine guns and placed them along the trailing edges of the wings. This system eliminated the heavy, manned turrets used on bombers already in service. Although the design made provisions for bomb racks and a bomb sight, the equipment was never included in either prototype.

The USAAF bombers then in service had crews of up to 10 people. The proposed B-42 would have only three—a pilot, copilot/gunner and bombardier. They sat in unpressurized compartments, with the pilot and copilot/gunner side-by-side underneath twin “bug-eye”

canopies and the bombardier seated ahead of the pilot in a glazed nose section. The twin canopy arrangement made communications between the pilot and copilot difficult, so the second prototype had a conventional single canopy. The copilot could rotate his seat 180 degrees to operate the gun control panel.

In May 1943, Wright Field’s Aircraft Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, affirmed the design as “practical for immediate construction” and recommended building at least two prototypes, initially designated as the XA-42 (“A” signifying “attack”). Once the USAAF approved the mockup, it changed the aircraft’s purpose to that of a bomber and redesignated it the XB-42. Douglas later attached the unofficial name of “Mixmaster” because the propellers reminded people of a popular kitchen mixer

manufactured by the Sunbeam company.

The first prototype, serial number 43-50224, made its initial flight on May 6, 1944, in Palm Springs, California. Contractor test pilots made 32 flights that led to numerous adjustments before Douglas turned the airplane over to the USAAF on August 16. One significant problem that Douglas encountered was with engine/propeller vibration but eventually engineers developed a new gear box with shock mounts that reduced it to an acceptable level. The bomb bay doors, when open, created even more vibration, though this was eliminated by adjusting the airflow around them.

The second prototype, serial number 43-50225, became airborne for the first time on August 1, 1944. It was expected to benefit from a lighter airframe. Douglas test pilots flew it for 70 hours before its official turnover to the USAAF

Top left: Among the test pilots who flew the XB-42 were Lt. Col. Henry E. Warden (left) and Captain Glen W. Edwards (right). Top right: The copilot’s seat could be rotated 180 degrees to face the gun control panel (out of view).

Above left: Hinged hoods allowed for easy access to the pair of Allison V-1710 engines installed immediately behind the pilot’s compartment. Above right: Rear-facing .50-caliber guns installed at the trailing edges of the wings were the only defensive armament tested for the

B-42 project. The guns were stowed within snap-action doors.

in October. Ascani and Captain Glen W. Edwards then flew the airplane for an additional 48 hours, most of it done at Muroc Army Airfield (later renamed for Edwards after he was killed in the crash of the Northrup YB-49). Even with weight-saving reductions, this airplane fell short of its performance targets. It did not meet maximum speed at altitude nor at sea level, or range with guaranteed bomb load. It met the guarantees for rate of climb at sea level, two-engine service ceiling, and take-off and landing distances over a 50-foot obstacle.

Many of the XB-42’s flight characteristics were quite good. Pilots praised its overall stability, maneuverability and stall characteristics. Despite some issues, including poor controllability at low speeds, Ascani enjoyed flying the

Mixmaster, noting it was much quieter than conventional prop-driven planes since the propellers were in the rear.

On December 8, 1945, Edwards and Lt. Col. Henry E. Warden flew XB-42 50225 on an attempt to set a transcontinental speed record. They left Long Beach, California, for the 2,295mile flight to Bolling. The west-to-east flight path took advantage of the 60-mph jet stream, which contributed to the record-setting average speed of 433.6 mph and an elapsed time of 5 hours, 17 minutes, 34 seconds. Accounting for the jet stream, the aircraft’s true average speed was about 375 mph.

Things did not go as smoothly for Ascani and his two friends eight days later. The flight started inauspiciously; after taking off from

BOTH ENGINES QUIT AND ASCANI ORDERED HIS CREW TO BAIL OUT.

Above: XB-42 number one became the XB-42A with the installation of auxiliary jet engines. Below: This view of the all-jet YB-43 shows the aircraft with its original plexiglass nose. Because of cracking at altitude, the nose was later replaced with one made mostly of plywood.

Bolling, Ascani had to retract the gear with the emergency system. Roughly 40 minutes later, smoke started to fill the cockpit and the instruments showed the engines were overheating. Then both engines quit in quick succession. Ascani ordered his two passengers to bail out, which they did successfully. Just as he was about to jump, Ascani realized he had not jettisoned the props and “had visions of his friends being mangled” as they went plunging through the spinning blades. He triggered the switch that severed the props and the nearly 400-pound gear box. This made a drastic shift in the aircraft’s center of gravity and the XB-42 plunged into a steep dive. Ascani departed the aircraft at an altitude of 400 feet—just high enough for his chute to fully deploy. He landed not far from the place where the Mixmaster fell, at Oxon Hill, Maryland.

The investigation traced the problem with the landing gear to the hydraulic system. The reasons for the engine failures remained unclear, though fuel starvation was suspected as the cause for the right engine’s quitting. The investigation team did not blame Ascani for the crash.

On March 19, 1946, Edwards was making another test flight in the remaining XB-42 when a rod in the left engine separated and exited through the side of the block. Edwards managed to land safely. At this point, the decision was made to cancel the remainder of the planned test schedule for the propeller-driven XB-42. Instead, the Army wanted to supplement the Allison engines with a pair of auxiliary 1,600-pound thrust Westinghouse 19XB-2 jets within under-wing pods. (Adding

The YB-43 (the “Y” indicating a pre-production aircraft) had its revised nose painted red and bore the name Versatile II. The XB-43 had been named Versatile. Major Arthur “Kit” Murray (at right) was among the test pilots who flew the YB-43.

jets had been foreseen from the start, so some provisions for them were already present.) Difficulties with the new jet engines, and the fact that demand outstripped supply, resulted in a lengthy delay in getting them, though.

The jet-powered airplane was redesignated as the XB-42A and flew for the first time on May 27, 1947. By then the maximum gross weight had increased to 44,900 pounds, but while the increased drag induced by the add-on jets was noticeable, the airplane’s top speed rose to 487 mph at 16,700 feet. The fuel-thirsty jets reduced the maximum range to 4,750 miles.

Douglas built the XB-42 without expectation of a production order, but the Army did consider acquiring up to 100 photo-reconnaissance versions of the XB-42A. At the time, only three aircraft under consideration for photo reconnais-

sance met the requirement for very long range. However, the all-jet XB-43 was then (mistakenly) expected to be available in production quantities in 1945 and was considered a better choice for the task.

Design work on the XB-43 began soon after the XB-42 project got underway. By the time the XB-42 was upgraded to the “A” version, both Jetmasters, serial numbers 44-61508 and 509, had already flown. They were powered by a pair of Allison J35 turbojets that provided a total of 8,000 pounds of thrust, and Douglas promised a maximum speed at sea level of 503 mph, and 453 mph at 35,000 feet. With an 8,000pound bomb load and a speed of 420 mph at an altitude of 40,700 feet, the range was calculated to be 1,440 miles, though reducing the bomb load to 2,000 pounds would increase range to 2,370 miles at the same speed and altitude. Crew size remained at three, with the navigator-bombardier sitting in the nose section and the pilot and relief pilot sitting side-by-side under separate canopies as with the first XB-42.

Development of the J35 engine had been underway since 1943. Begun by GE and then transferred to Allison, the program had been plagued by technical issues. One of the more extreme failures happened during ground testing when a compressor blade in the right-side engine exploded

through the engine casing, injuring a technician and damaging the airframe. The J35 also suffered from oil leaks, turbine wheel problems and other issues before it was finally made airworthy. Engine failures still occurred during some flight tests, however.

At one point, the Army considered purchasing 13 YB-43s and at least 50 production versions. This was before World War II had ended and the Allies wanted jet aircraft that could compete with those of the Luftwaffe. Once the war ended in Europe and the first prototype remained mired in delays, the Army’s interest in the B-43 shifted from possible deployment to research and familiarization. Other jet-powered medium bombers in the design stage, the XB-45, XB-46 and XB-47, showed more promise.

The XB-43 was well ahead of other bomber projects by the time it first flew on May 17, 1946, with Douglas test pilots Bob Brush and Russell

Above: Versatile II takes off on another test flight. Top right: This impressive view of the YB-43 banking over the Mojave makes its relationship to the XB-42 obvious. Below: A head-on view of the YB-43 clearly shows the twin canopies that gave it a bug-eyed appearance. Pilots were not happy with the twin canopy arrangement.

Thaw on board. This flight lasted only eight minutes, reaching an altitude of 1,500 feet and a top speed of 230 mph. The final contractor flight took place on February 20, 1947, with Brush and James Little as the crew. Further test flights revealed the XB-43 was capable of fulfilling or even exceeding the performance specifications Douglas had guaranteed, with the exception of take-off and landing distances. The plane’s top speed was found to be 515 mph at 5,000 feet at 32,000 pounds gross weight.

The XB-43 still had issues to overcome, though. One of them involved its plexiglass. On the 12th test flight the XB-43 reached 35,000 feet, but the canopies cracked at the high altitude, forcing a redesign. Low temperatures or sudden temperature changes affected the plexiglass nose panels the same way. The problem forced the program to restrict the altitude to 20,000 feet. Finally, engineers reworked the aircraft’s nose using mostly plywood. Pilots also complained that the right canopy obscured their view, so any future B-43s would have received a single, large canopy unit as the second XB-42 had. Additional issues with the Jetmaster included stability problems at high speed and limited center of gravity range. Its unusual characteristics made it necessary to be cautious when instructing pilots how to fly it.

After a lengthy delay for the installation of revised engines, the second

aircraft, designated YB-43 (with the “Y” designating a pre-production aircraft), finally made its first flight on May 15, 1947, with Russell Thaw as pilot. This aircraft was transferred to Muroc about 11 months later. After completion of its test flights, the aircraft was assigned to the AMC Power Plant Laboratory to conduct tests with the new GE J47 axial flow jet engine.

The first XB-43 retired from flight testing after becoming damaged in February 1951, and it became a source of spare parts for the remainder of the YB-43 test program. Ultimately, the first prototype, like many surplus and obsolete aircraft, was destroyed as a ground test target for training. The second YB-43 continued to fly until December 1953, when it finally retired with over 300 hours of flight time.

The Air Force donated the XB-42A and YB-43 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1949 and 1954, respectively. In 2010 both were transferred to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. They now sit side-by-side in the museum’s restoration facility, though neither is currently scheduled for restoration work.

If the XB-42’s test program had somehow progressed at a significantly faster rate, then perhaps a few photo-reconnaissance versions might have flown missions over Japanese territory in the closing weeks of World War II. Faster development of jet engines would probably have resulted in some limited production of the B-43. History did not happen that way, so neither aircraft became a “crate of thunder” for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Instead, they remain quirky examples of an aircraft that had one wing in the propeller era and another in the jet age.

David W. Temple has been a freelance writer for 37 years. Despite a virtually lifelong interest in aviation, his work has largely been on automotive history, a subject upon which he has written five books. For further reading he recommends The Big Book of X-Bombers and X-Fighters: USAF Jet-Powered Experimental Aircraft and Their Propulsive Systems by Steve Pace.

A COMPRESSOR BLADE EXPLODED THROUGH THE ENGINE CASING, INJURING A TECHNICIAN AND DAMAGING THE AIRFRAME.

The British B.E.2c was not intended to be a fighter. Instead, its docile qualities made it better suited as an observation airplane. In this illustration by Adam Tooby, a B.E.2c shows its limitations as it falls victim to a German Eindecker

BAD REPUTATION

WORLD WAR I’S BRITISH

B.E.2c WAS BETTER THAN MANY PEOPLE THINK

BY ROBERT GUTTMAN

For more than a century the Royal Aircraft Factory’s B.E.2c has been denigrated as one of the worst aircraft ever made. E ven during World War I, when it was on active service with the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the B.E.2c was condemned as a death trap that lacked the speed and maneuverability to evade attack as well as any effective armament with which to defend itself. Although there was some justification for those assessments, critics overlook the fact that the aircraft originated before WWI began, and before those criteria were even considered. In fact, the principal considerations in the B.E.2c’s design were stability, ease of handling and safety, not speed, agility or defensive capability.

In fairness, the B.E.2c’s negative reputation may be an exaggeration. Much of that stems from the fact that the airplane remained in production and operational long after it clearly had become obsolete. In addition, the Royal Aircraft Factory in general, and the B.E.2c in particular, received negative publicity generated by a segment of the British aircraft industry, particularly by Noel Pemberton-Billing, a vocal member of Parliament and self-proclaimed aviation expert.

The Royal Aircraft Factory (RAF, not to be confused with the Royal Air Force, which wasn’t formed until April 1918) was established at Farnborough in 1906 when the Army Balloon Factory branched into development of heavier-than-air flying machines. Although assigned to create aircraft for the British Army’s newly established Royal Flying Corps, from the outset the institution was more of an experimental and developmental establishment than a production facility. Indeed, despite accusations from the aircraft industry that the British government was unfairly competing against private enterprise, the vast majority of RAF designs, including the B.E.2c, actually were manufactured by private companies rather than by the RAF itself.

The story of the B.E.2c begins with the B.E.1, the airplane from which it derived. The B.E.1 project was supposed to have been simply the repair of a damaged airplane; instead, in 1911 designer Geoffrey de Havilland created an entirely new one. His B.E.1 was a two-seat general purpose tractor biplane, with the “B.E.” signifying “Blériot Experimental.” (To the RAF “B.E.” meant any tractor-type airplane, while pusher airplanes received the designation “F.E.” for “Farman Experimental.”) All that remained of the airplane de Havilland was supposed to repair was the engine, a 60-hp

liquid-cooled Wolseley V-8. In December 1911 de Havilland piloted the B.E.1’s first flight himself and he delivered it to the RFC early in 1912.

T he B.E.1 was a two-seat airplane with unstaggered biplane wings and tail surfaces consisting of a fixed airfoil-section horizontal stabilizer ahead of the elevators and a vertical rudder without a fixed vertical stabilizer. The observer sat in front of the pilot and occupied the center of gravity, enabling the aircraft to be flown without any alteration in trim if the observer’s seat was unoccupied. T he airframe was wood, with the top and bottom of the fuselage covered with plywood for additional strength. Despite the early date of its design, the B.E.1 included all the characteristics one would currently recognize in an airplane save for the fact that, rather than ailerons, it employed wing warping for lateral control. On March 14, 1912, the B.E.1 became one of the very first aircraft to receive an official Certificate of Airworthiness.

In February 1912 the B.E.1 was succeeded by the B.E.2, which was almost identical save for the substitution of a 60-hp air-cooled Renault V-8 engine for the B.E.1’s less-than-satisfactory Wolseley. It also became the first standard type of aircraft the RFC adopted for use. In March 1912, less than a month after the B.E.2 entered service, the RAF used it to flight test a newly developed radio transmitter.

Only two B.E.2s were constructed before it was succeeded by the incrementally improved B.E.2a, a total of about 80 of which were manufactured, mostly by Vickers and Bristol. The

Left: Geoffrey de Havilland was hired by the Royal Aircraft Factory in 1910 as a test pilot and aircraft designer. Right: de Havilland’s B.E.1 provided the basis for the B.E.2 and its variants.

total number of B.E.2bs manufactured is not certain, however, because many were apparently completed as the later and substantially improved B.E.2c version.

Once the RFC adopted the B.E.2 series for mass-production, the airplane became the subject of a series of experiments conducted by another brilliant young RAF designer and test pilot, Edward Teshmaker Busk. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Busk became interested in perfecting aircraft stability. At the time, the British Army considered stability of vital importance—more than speed or maneuverability— because it wanted well-behaved reconnaissance airplanes in which the pilot could take his hands off the controls while making notes of enemy positions, taking photographs or even operating a radio transmitter. Positive stability was also important because early airplane pilots lacked blind flying instruments and could easily become disoriented in clouds and fall into a spin, something only an experienced pilot could survive.

Busk was both a theoretical and empirical engineer and he tested many ideas, including increasing dihedral, adding stabilizing fins to various parts of the airframe and even installing interplane struts incorporating additional side area. A lthough he test-flew many of his alterations himself, he also made use of a huge whirling arm, like an enormous centrifuge, to which he attached entire airframes in place of a wind tunnel.

As a result of his research, Busk redesigned the aircraft into the B.E.2c. While resembling earlier versions, this was almost an entirely new design. Not only did Busk add a large fixed vertical stabilizing tail fin, but he replaced the horizontal stabilizer with an entirely new design without the earlier version’s lifting airfoil section. He also revised the mainplanes with a new airfoil shape, new planform, positive stagger and added dihedral. Most noticeably, Busk replaced the old wing warping system with ailerons on all four wings, a change that strengthened the wing structure because the wings no longer needed to be flexible.

Powered either by a 70-hp Renault V-8 or a 90-hp RAF1a, both air-cooled V-8 engines, the B.E.2c could achieve a maximum speed of 72 mph, a ceiling of 10,000 feet and had an endurance of 3½ hours. From the first flight on May 30, 1914, pilots appreciated the B.E.2c’s docile qualities. On June 9, Major William Sefton Brancker flew his B.E.2c for 40 miles without ever having to touch the controls until he

reached his destination and began to descend for a landing. Immediately popular with service pilots, the B.E.2c quickly superseded earlier versions of the aircraft on the production lines and was manufactured by no less than 20 aircraft companies. While initially intended for reconnaissance and observation, the aircraft later came to serve as bombers, trainers and even as fighters.

E dward Busk did not live long enough to enjoy his success. O n November 5, 1914, he died when a B.E.2c he was test-flying caught fire in midair and crashed. A lthough it has never been confirmed, the fire may have been caused by the premature detonation of a new type of incendiary bomb developed by the RAF. W hatever the cause, Britain lost one of its most brilliant and promising engineers and test pilots at the age of 28.

The various B.E.2s may not have been the most warlike of airplanes, but no one could accuse the pilots who flew it of lacking aggressiveness. B.E.2 variants equipped the first RFC squadrons deployed to support the British Expeditionary Force in France. On August

Top: A B.E.2c pilot demonstrates the art of aerial photography. To fly and take photographs, a flyer needed a stable airplane. Above: Stability was what Edward Teshmaker Busk had in mind when he modified the B.E.2 into the B.E.2c.

13, 1914, B.E.2a No. 347, flown by Lieutenant Hubert D. Harvey-Kelly, became the first British warplane to fly across the English Channel.

Twelve days later Harvey-Kelly and his observer, W.H.C. Mansfield, flew the same B.E.2a to score the first British air-to-air victory—after a fashion—when they attacked a Rumpler Taube with small arms they had brought with them. Forcing the startled Germans to the ground and driving them into the nearby woods for cover, Harvey-Kelly landed and, after collecting souvenirs from the Taube, set it on fire and took off again.

On April 26, 1915, 2nd Lt. William B. RhodesMoorhouse flew his B.E.2b into Belgium to drop a 100-pound bomb on the Kortrijk railroad junction. Wounded by ground fire, he managed to return to base and report the success of his mission before going to the hospital, where he died the next day. Rhodes-Moorhouse became the first pilot to receive the Victoria Cross.

After German U-boats began menacing British coastal shipping, the Royal Navy retaliated by ordering a fleet of anti-submarine patrol blimps. Rather than design a control car for the new airships, the Navy simply suspended B.E.2c fuselages beneath the envelopes. The Navy produced 27 “Submarine Scout” airships this way.

When German Zeppelin airships initiated night bombing raids on British cities, the B.E.2c took on a new role as a night interceptor. Although lacking the performance of single-seat scouts, the B.E.2c’s positive stability made it the safest choice for the role of a night fighter in the absence of night-flying instruments. B.E.2cs received credit for shooting down seven

Zeppelins. A fter the first such instance, on the night of September 2-3, 1916, B.E.2c pilot Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson received the Victoria Cross.

During the first year of the war, few airplanes flew over the front, and they rarely encountered each other in the air. When they did, more often than not they lacked any effective armament with which to attack each other. However, the notorious “Fokker Scourge” against Allied aircraft began as early as July 1915 when the Germans introduced the Fokker Eindecker (monoplane), the first single-seat fighter to be effectively armed with a synchronized forward-firing machine gun. They produced only 416 of them, however, and never had many over the front lines. Moreover, the Eindeckers left a good deal to be desired as fighter planes. Since they relied on wing warping for lateral control, they were not very maneuverable and their wings were relatively thin and fragile. Furthermore, the limited power of available engines and the weight of the machine gun and ammunition meant that they could achieve a maximum speed of only 87 mph. Initially the Eindeckers were not deployed in specialized fighter squadrons but issued piecemeal, a few at a time, to mixed Feldflieger Abteilungen (Field Flying Companies), which operated several different aircraft types suited to perform a variety of aerial missions. As a result, the success of the Eindeckers during 1915 and early 1916 depended on luck and the aerial tactics developed by individual pilots. Even Oswald Boelcke, the most successful German fighter pilot of the first half of WWI, shot down only six Allied aircraft throughout 1915.

Nevertheless, the introduction of armed enemy aircraft highlighted the slow and stable B.E.2c’s vulnerability, transforming its positive qualities into liabilities. Although the British made attempts to install defensive machine guns on the B.E.2c, the observer/gunner’s position in the forward cockpit meant his field of fire was obstructed by the pilot, propeller, wings, struts and bracing wires. The RAF addressed the problem late in 1915 with the R.E.8, a two-seat reconnaissance plane with the observer seated more effectively in the rear with a machine gun. Due to the nature of the British War Office’s procurement system, however, many aircraft manufacturers could not shift production to the R.E.8 until they had fulfilled their B.E.2c contracts. The R.E.8 did not reach squadrons until November 1916, so the B.E.2c had to soldier on far longer than it should have done. By the time the R.E.8 appeared it, too, was becoming outdated, generating even more criticism of the RAF.

Much of that criticism came from Noel Pemberton-Billing. Born Noel Billing in 1881, he adopted the “Pemberton” during a brief stint as an actor. After fighting in the Boer War, he returned to England and became

Left: Noel Pemberton-Billing was a vociferous critic of the Royal Aircraft Factory. An airline enthusiast himself, he created the cumbersome Supermarine Nighthawk (right) to deal with the German Zeppelin menace. The quadraplane was not successful.

interested in aviation, getting his pilot’s license and launching an aviation company, Pemberton-Billing Ltd., which later became the foundation of the Supermarine company of Spitfire fame after Pemberton-Billing sold his interests. Pemberton-Billing won election to Parliament in 1916 and turned his attention and skills at invective to attack Britain’s aviation establishment. “The Government and its advisors, expert and otherwise, never believed in the reality of the air menace,” he wrote in his 1916 book Air War: How to Wage It. “They sneered at the Zeppelin, they laughed at the aeroplane. Who laughs today? Who pays the price for the work that was not done?” Pemberton-Billing even built a huge and grotesque twin-engine, multi-seat quadraplane, the Supermarine Nighthawk, for intercepting Zeppelins. It proved an abject failure in that role.

The RAF did attempt to address the B.E.2c’s lack of speed by introducing the improved B.E.2e version early in 1916. (The “d” variant was a dual-control training version of the B.E.2c produced in modest numbers.)

The B.E.2e featured an entirely new set of unequal-span single-bay wings, similar to the R.E.8’s. The new version had a top speed of 82 mph and the climb rate was slightly better, improvements deemed sufficient to warrant production orders. The dual-control trainer version of the B.E.2e was known as the B.E.2f.

One development of the B.E.2 that has come under a particular degree of unfair criticism was the B.E.12, which many aviation historians have derided as the RAF’s failed attempt to create a single-seat fighter. Actually the B.E.12 first flew in July 1915, long before effective forward-firing armament was available in Britain, and the RAF conceived it as a single-seat bomber and photo-reconnaissance platform. It received a forward-firing machine gun much later, after the perfection of synchronizing mechanisms. Although lacking the maneuverability needed by a frontline fighter, the B.E.12’s excellent stability and forward-firing armament made it a useful home-defense night fighter. One contributed to the

destruction of Zeppelin L48 on June 17, 1917. Although the exact figures are not precisely known, it is estimated that the total production number of all B.E.2 variants was about 3,500, the vast majority being the B.E.2c version. T he B.E.2c equipped no less than 72 RFC squadrons and four Navy squadrons. B elgium’s small air service used B.E.2cs and B.E.2ds powered by Hispano-Suiza engines after sensibly modifying theirs to put the pilot up front with a synchronized Vickers machine gun and the observer aft, manning a .303-inch Lewis machine gun on a ring mounting. In August 1918 the U.S. Army Air Service purchased B.E.2es for training purposes. B.E.s served not only over the Western Front but also the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia.

The B.E.2c was essentially a good airplane that simply outlasted its time but performed as intended until the evolving air war made it obsolete. Its large production, a huge number for such an early airplane, belies the undeserved bad reputation of an airplane that successfully fulfilled a wide variety of military roles all over the world right to the end of World War I.

Robert Guttman is a regular contributor to Aviation History. For further reading he recommends The Royal Aircraft Factory by Paul R. Hare.

B.E.2cs shot down seven Zeppelins during World War I. The first time, pictured here, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson destroyed the SL.11 on the night of September 2-3, 1916. Robinson received the Victoria Cross for his actions that night.

THE BIGGER THEY ARE…

The year was 1930 and His Majesty’s Airship

R101 was the pride of Britain. R101 was a rigid dirigible, with a steel framework, diesel engines and huge bags filled with hydrogen for lift. At 777 feet in length, it was bigger “than anything that has flown before,” as S.C. Gwynne writes. One of the first airships built to gird the British empire, R101 had a posh interior that included an art deco dining room, a lounge, promenades and a smoking room. However, despite its stateof-the-art engineering, R101 was a disaster waiting to happen.

REVIEWS

The British should have known better. German zeppelins that attacked Britain’s mainland during World War I had ultimately failed dismally. By the postwar era it should have been obvious to the British that airships were problematic. The fuel for their engines, their outer coverings and the lifting hydrogen were highly flammable, and the weather could be deadly, with strong winds creating problems thanks to the airships’ large surface areas. During the 1920s airship disasters abounded as dirigibles often crashed and exploded into flames. In fairness, some aeronautical experts

understood the airships’ vulnerabilities. But despite the dirigibles’ flaws, British officialdom wasn’t dissuaded from championing them.

Why did Britain persevere in building these flying death traps? The ruling establishment had its reasons for overlooking the flaws. Its (wobbling) empire was a major motive. Political mandarins, led by this book’s main personality, Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, were convinced that airships would expedite travel between Britain and its colonies, thus binding mother country and colonies closer. Thomson aimed to make a round trip aboard R101 between England and India, a flight that would also further his goal of becoming Viceroy of India. Another reason for Britain’s unwillingness to give up on airships: once the government bureaucracy was committed to commissioning the huge craft, a peculiar British quirk pervaded the enterprise— British acquiescence to social and professional hierarchy. When individuals involved in constructing R101 became aware of potential compli-

AIRSHIP

The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine

by S.C. Gwynne, Scribner, 2023, $32.00

R101 soars over London on its first flight. The date was October 14, 1929. Just under a year later the airship crashed in France, killing 48.

AN INTERVIEW WITH S.C. GWYNNE

The author of His Majesty’s Airship talked to Aviation History about his book. Here’s an excerpt:

The percentage of [airship] crashes was just overwhelming. I mean, crash after crash after crash. A lot of them were hydrogen fireballs…. Airplanes were improvable, you could improve the wing loading, you could improve the safety, but airships—again, these are rigid airships, not blimps, with hard metal structures. That was a technology where you had six acres of sail area, and when a 40-mile-an-hour, 50mile-an-hour wind hit, it didn’t perform well…. The Germans had used them as weapons in World War I, a massive failure on many different levels. So, in 1924, the British decide that they’re going to launch their Imperial Airships team. At that moment there’s only one rigid airship flying in the world. A sane person might conclude that they should have stopped. But there was something weirdly nationalistic. As I say in the book, the airships were half engineering and half nationalism—patriotism, national pride. It’s what kept the Germans doing it for a long time, the sense that they were better than other people. And the British frankly wanted to emulate the Germans after the war, and the Americans too. They all had this sense that you could build something that big with your technology, with a sense of real national pride tied up into it…. And governments might have said, “Yeah, why bother?” But [airships] were big and impressive looking. The star of my book is 777 feet long. That’s two and a half football fields; it’s larger than the Titanic by volume. When people saw this thing it suggested the colossal kind of ambition that was in play.

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

cations, they felt constrained from pointing them out to higher-ups in the chain of command. Inevitably, folly led to catastrophe. At 2:09 a.m. on October 5, 1930, R101, on its first official voyage, crashed into the French countryside at the start of its Indian trek, the victim of a chain reac-

tion of mechanical system and human failures. Forty-eight passengers (including Thomson) and crew members died. Six crewmen survived. Britain’s infatuation with airships was over.

His Majesty’s Airship, deeply researched, contains a warning: the combination of hubris and technology bereft of proper testing and prudent communication creates a blueprint for disaster.

—Howard Schneider

ROUND-ENGINE WARBIRDS

With his latest book, aviation author Bill Yenne applies his considerable talents to describing the radial engines that went into some of the great U.S. and Allied combat planes of World War II. Designed with their cylinders arranged in a circular pattern around the shaft like spokes on a wheel, these powerplants were noted for their mechanical simplicity, power output and operational reliability.

The story really comes to life in the 1920s when American engineers Charles Lanier Lawrance at Wright Aeronautical and Frederick Brant Rentschler at Pratt & Whitney led the production of cost-effective round air-cooled engines. From Wright’s 200-horsepower J-5/R-790 Whirlwind and Pratt’s 425-horsepower R-1340 Wasp, the two companies kept innovating to give the U.S. the engines it needed to win the coming global conflict. A key performance boost came via incorporation of a second row of cylinders, as manifested in Wright’s R-2600 Twin Cyclone and Pratt’s R-2800 Double Wasp, which powered multiple platforms including the North American B-25 Mitchell and the Grumman F6F Hellcat, respectively. The emergence of the jet engine during World War II spelled the end of the radial-engine era, but not before Boeing adopted Wright’s R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone for the B-29 Superfortress and Consolidated chose Pratt’s R-4360 Wasp Major for the postwar B-36 Peacemaker.

Yenne’s comprehensive assemblage of engine and aircraft details is nothing short of staggering. The book is enhanced by copious black-andwhite and color photos along with schematics from the manufacturers’ technical manuals, accompanied by informative captions. Expertly organized and brilliantly written, this handsome volume is an indispensable reference for enthusiasts interested in the period’s radial engines and the aircraft they powered. —Philip

Handleman

ALUMINUM ALLEY

When Japan went to war against the Allies on December 7, 1941, it had already been fighting in China for 10 years. By then every means of com-

AMERICA’S ROUND-ENGINE WARBIRDS

Airframes and Powerplants at the Close of the Military Prop Era by Bill Yenne, Specialty Press, 2022, $46.95

ALUMINUM ALLEY

The American Pilots Who Flew Over the Himalayas and Helped Win World War II by Rory Laverty, Stackpole Books, 2023, $29.95

AIRLIFT 1942-43 The Luftwaffe’s Broken Promise to Sixth Army

by William E. Hiestand,

munication with China had been cut off except for the Burma Road that ran from Rangoon through Burma to China. In the spring of 1942 Japan’s rapid conquest of Burma closed off that tenuous route as well. The only way left to supply the Chinese and keep them fighting was by air from India. To that end, the U.S. Army Air Forces established an unprecedented airlift of cargo planes flying from Assam, in northeastern India, across the Himalayas to China. The aircrews had to fly overloaded cargo planes over the tallest mountains in the world, through some of the worst weather imaginable, and with minimal instrumentation, maps and navigation equipment. Although enemy interference with the cargo aircraft was relatively rare, simply reaching the destination presented serious hazards. The result, as Rory Laverty points out Aluminum , was that fully a third of those assigned to fly “over the hump” never returned.

clusion that the Luftwaffe did not lose the aerial logistic battle—the Soviet air force, or Voyenno Vozdushny-Sili, won it.

As much a turning point as the mutually costly battle in and around Stalingrad was the change in the air war. In April 1942, after almost a year of relentless losses and organizational chaos, Joseph Stalin—whose politically motivated purges had much to do with the air force’s plight—appointed General-Leytenant Aleksandr Novikov commander of the VVS. The organizational and tactical reforms he initiated slowly but surely transformed his air arm into one that during the airlift had twice as many aircraft in the air as the Germans—just the prelude to a resurgence that would overwhelm the Luftwaffe in the East. Placing rare focus on the aerial aspect of the campaign, Stalingrad Airlift 1942-43 explains its role in that strategic turnaround. —Jon

Guttman

F2H BANSHEE UNITS

by Richard R.

REVOLT The Story of the Women Who Kicked Open the Door to Fly in Combat

By Eileen A. Bjorkman, Knox Press, 2023, $30

STALINGRAD AIRLIFT

Guttman

Laverty tells the story of the China Airlift largely through the experiences of his grandfather, Mel Hodell, a pilot from Detroit who served mainly as copilot in Curtiss C-46 Commandos during 1944 and 1945. Although large and capacious, the C-46 had originally been designed to carry airline passengers over commercial air routes, not to fly over tall mountains while weighed down with cargo and with its wings and fuselage covered with layers of ice. The author recounts a fascinating story that has been underreported, partly because the exploits of cargo plane pilots have always received less notice than “combat” pilots, but also because China-Burma-India tends to receive less attention than other theaters of World War II. —Robert

As the German effort to take the city of Stalingrad ground to a halt and the resurgent Soviet forces switched to the offensive in late November 1942, the German Sixth Army found itself surrounded and cut off from desperately needed supplies. After seeing two previous successful resupplies by air over Demyansk and the Kuban, ReichsmarHermann Göring promised Adolf Hitler that the Luftwaffe would be able to deliver the needed goods. His airmen faced greater challenges resupplying Stalingrad and had their doubts. As things turned out, the doubters were right and the Luftwaffe’s airlift attempt went down among World War II’s great failures. In No. 34 of Osprey’s “Air Campaigns” series, however, former U.S. Department of Defense analyst William E. Hiestand takes a more balanced look at the two sides and makes the long-overlooked con-

F2H BANSHEE UNITS

The last straight-wing jet fighter to see service in the U.S. Navy, the McDonnell F2H Banshee was very much a transitional airplane. Entering service as a gunship that also packed unguided rockets and bombs, it ended its relatively long career as the first nuclear-strike tactical jet with heat-seeking Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Although neither as famous as the Grumman F9F-5 Panther or the F9F-6 Cougar, nor as notorious as the Vought F7U Cutlass, it remained in service longer than any of them. In F2H Banshee Units, Richard R. Burgess, a former naval flight officer and current senior editor of Seapower magazine, comprehensibly summarizes the activities of the versatile fighter-bomber and photo-reconnaissance airplane on aircraft carriers and land bases, along with its largely forgotten but successful tour of duty during the Korean War. As with all of Osprey’s “Combat Aircraft” series, the Banshee’s many incarnations are illustrated by 30 color profiles, one of which represents the only foreign country to operate it, Canada. —Jon

Guttman

FLY GIRLS REVOLT

War is conflict, but Eileen Bjorkman’s book focuses on conflict of another kind, as American women pilots battled sexism, bureaucracy and institutional inertia so they could fly in combat.

Bjorkman starts her story with famed aviator Jacqueline Cochran, a complex figure who sought to get women involved in military aviation during World War II. With support from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Cochran became the first women to ferry a bomber across the Atlantic and later recruited women to ferry aircraft in Britain. In

Osprey Publishing,

Burgess, Osprey Publishing, 2022, $24

her wake came the WAACs (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps), and the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). In 1943 Cochran became head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), but her pilots were officially civilians, not military. Overall, though, Cochran’s prickly personality could be as much of a hindrance as a help when it came to supporting women.

Even after giving women permanent status in the military in 1948, the United States barred them from combat. As the years passed, women proved themselves in support roles—sometimes under combat conditions—and the pressure increased to let them fly actual combat missions. A defense bill signed by President George H.W. Bush at the end of 1991 finally repealed the combat restriction but the services, especially the Air Force, continued to drag its feet over implementation. Finally, on February 14, 1994, Air Force Lieutenant Jeannie Flynn graduated from F-15E training and became the United States’ first female fighter pilot.

Author Bjorkman knows what she writes about. A retired colonel in the Air Force, she accumulated more than 700 hours in various aircraft. Throughout Fly Girls Revolt, Bjorkman leavens her history with stories of successes as well as setbacks and petty humiliations from her own career and provides personal information gained from interviews with other women in the military. Her account is often frustrating, sometimes amusing and often illuminating. —Tom Huntington

FINNISH ACES

During World War II, Finland was in the peculiar position of being something of the “odd man in.” Although ostensibly on the Axis side, it became involved for its own separate reasons and was, in fact, invaded by the Soviet Union, rather than the other way around. The blue swastika national marking painted on Finnish aircraft since 1918, known in Finland as the hakaristi, had nothing to do with German National Socialism.

Resisting invasion by its much larger neighbor in 1939, Finland was the only Axis nation for which the Allied nations expressed sympathy and, prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, even went so far as to provide military assistance. As a result, the Finnish air force or Ilmavoimat was in the peculiar position of operating aircraft derived from both Axis and Allied nations and flew what was possibly the most cosmopolitan inventory of aircraft of any combatant. They were frequently supplied with aircraft that the donor nations no longer wanted, such as the Italian Fiat G.50, French Cau-

dron-Renault 714 and American Brewster B-239 Buffalo. They even used reconditioned aircraft captured from the Russians. Yet, as the profusely illustrated Finnish Aces explains, the well-trained and highly motivated Finnish fighter pilots did surprisingly well. Containing the histories of eight fighter regiments and details about the careers of no less than 100 fighter aces, this new book is a comprehensive and well-illustrated account of a facet of World War II aviation that has received far less attention in the West than it deserves.

—Robert Guttman

LOST AT SEA

A year before Louis Zamperini was Unbroken by 47 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean in 1943, Eddie Rickenbacker lasted 24 days adrift. Along with seven others, the famed racecar driver and America’s leading World War I ace faced dehydration, starvation and exposure after the B-17D bomber he was riding in ditched in the vast, desolate expanse of the Pacific.

A new book tells this desperate story, focusing on the heroics of the Medal of Honor recipient and how he encouraged and cajoled those with him not to give up. Lost at Sea is a riveting account of determination and dedication in the face of danger and deprivation.

In 1942, Rickenbacker, who had scored 26 aerial victories in World War I, was one of the most famous aviators of his day, and he had returned to the spotlight a year earlier after an airline accident nearly killed him. Still hobbled by his injuries, Rickenbacker served his country again after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when he toured Army Air Corps bases across the country and told pilots how to prepare for combat. Then, on October 20, the 52-year-old Rickenbacker was a passenger on a Flying Fortress headed for New Guinea to deliver a secret message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to General Douglas MacArthur. Faulty navigation equipment caused the pilot, Captain William Cherry, to miss his refueling stop and ditch in the ocean. For the next 24 days, eight men fought dread and hopelessness while floating in two small life rafts over an immense, unforgiving sea.

Wukovits spins a spellbinding narrative of survival, detailing the extreme conditions and hardships the men faced. He also pulls no punches in describing the difficult relationship between Rickenbacker and Cherry as they fought over who should command the crew at sea (Rickenbacker won, but it left bitter feelings). Lost at Sea is exciting and deftly told; a great read about an obscure chapter of World War II. —Dave Kindy

Their Planes and Units 1939-1945

by Kari Stenman and Karolina Holda, MMP Books, 2022, $75

LOST AT SEA

Eddie Rickenbacker’s Twenty-Four Days Adrift on the Pacific—A World War II Tale of Courage and Faith

By John Wukovits, Dutton Caliber, 2023, $32

FLIGHT TEST

MYSTERY SHIP

Can you identify this winged Quasimodo?

BIPLANE FIGHTERS

Grumman F3F

Can you match the multi-wing airplane to its place in history?

1. Fiat CR.20

A. First fighter built for the Royal Air Force

7. Avia B-534

I-153

B. Last biplane fighter in the U.S. Navy

C. Most numerous Italian fighter in 1939

D. Last Soviet biplane fighter

E. Bolivian fighter mainstay of the Chaco War

F3F

8. Kawasaki Ki-10

9. Curtiss Hawk III

10. Fiat CR.42

ODD ARRANGEMENTS

1. Which aircraft had one engine, two propellers and a three-man crew?

A. Voisin 5 B. Weymann W-1

C. Salmson-Moineau SM.1 D. Gotha G.I

2. Which aircraft had two engines in an asymmetrical arrangement?

A. Gotha G.VI B. Friedrichshafen G.III

C. Caproni Ca.3 D. de Havilland DH-10

F. Scored first aerial victory by China’s air force

G. Last biplane fighter in the Japanese army

H. Flown by leading ace of the Spanish Civil War

I. Paraguayan single-seater of the Chaco War

J. Scored the last victory by a single-seat biplane fighter

3. Which aircraft had four engines inside the fuselage driving a single propeller?

A. Linke-Hofmann R.I B. DFW R.I

C. Lloyd 40.08 D. Linke-Hofmann R.II

4. Which aircraft had the most engines in a push-pull arrangement?

A. Dornier Do J Wal B. Dornier Do X

C. Consolidated B-24D D. Chyetverikov ARK-3

5. Which of these push-pull engine airplanes achieved production and a measure of success?

A. Dornier Do 335 B. Siemens-Schuckert DDr.I

C. Cessna 336 D. Fokker D.XXIII

ANSWERS: MYSTERY SHIP: SUD-EST AVIATION GROGNARD. BIPLANE FIGHTERS:

For more about this issue’s MYSTERY SHIP, visit historynet.com/mystery-ship-autumn-2023

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DOG MEET DOG

FINAL APPROACH

In a photograph taken sometime in 1944, Frank, a Fifteenth Air Force mascot, studies the nose art of Howling Wolf, a Consolidated B-24H Liberator. The big four-engine bomber, tail number 41-29266, belonged to the 741st Bomb Squadron of the 455th Bomb Group, 304th Bomb Wing, and was based at San Giovanni Field in Foggia, Italy. Renamed Doughty Dragon, the Liberator was lost on July 27, 1944, when a Focke-Wulf Fw-190 shot it down during a mission to Budapest.

Five of the crew were killed and five, including pilot Maxwell B. Gates, were taken prisoner. There is no record of the fate of Frank.

Soaring over English skies in 1940, Royal Air Force pilots knew they were all that stood between the British people below and the impending Nazi invasion. Day after day, these brave men took their Hurricanes and Spitfires to the air, relying on nothing and no one but their instruments and each other, to engage the invaders, defend their countrymen, and change the course of history by handing Hitler his first defeat of World War II.“Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few,” said Winston Churchill.

The Co-Pilot Men’s Watch is inspired by what was accomplished in the Battle of Britain. We studied classic aviator timepieces to match the vintage design and then gave it a 1940s price. Our watchmakers updated the movement for the 21st century, making it even more accurate than the originals. It features markings to calculate velocity, and a stylish sepia-toned dial carrying three classic complications: 24-hour at 3 o’clock and chronograph 60-minute at 9 o’clock. A vintage-style distressed brown leather strap recalls the battle-worn bomber jackets of the 1940s. Satisfaction is 100% Guaranteed. Take the Co-Pilot for a test flight and if it fails to impress, send it back within 30 days for a

Each one of our 1:30 scale metal figures is painstakingly researched for historical accuracy and detail. The originals are hand sculpted by our talented artists before being cast in metal and hand painted – making each figure a gem of handcrafted history. Please visit wbritain.com to see all these figures and more from many other historical eras.

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