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BY DAVE KINDY

ON THE COVER: In “One Down, Three to Go,” Jack Fellows illustrates Royce Williams’ encounter with Soviet MiGs over the Sea of Japan on November 18, 1952.

WINTER

26

BY STEVE WARTENBERG

36 THE MANY CRASHES OF CAL RODGERS

Seventy-five years ago, Howard Hughes took his massive seaplane aloft for the first and only time.

Three later model Learjets bank against

the rising sun. FEATURES5MAILBAG6BRIEFING10AVIATORS14RESTORED16EXTREMES18PORTFOLIO 24 FROM THE COCKPIT 66 REVIEWS 70 FLIGHT TEST 72 FINAL DEPARTMENTSAPPROACH 44 36 60 52 AVIATIONHISTORY ARTWORKS/ALAMYEASTON/FLIGHTGARYARCHIVES;NATIONALPHOTO;APCONGRESS;OFLIBRARYBOWEN;PAULTOP:FROMCLOCKWISE AVHP-WINTER-CONTENTS.indd 2 8/26/22 1:19 PM

Fly across the country in 30 days or less? Not so easy in 1911.

60 ONE AND DONE

26 THE LEAR OF LEARJET

Lancaster L7576 had flown 98 sorties. It would not complete number 99.

Bill Lear liked putting his name on things— including the quintessential business jet.

BY GAVIN MORTIMER

44 FINAL MISSION

BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

BY CHRISTOPHER WARNER 2023

Royce Williams did something incredible during the Korean War—but he couldn’t talk about it.

52 THE SECRET DOGFIGHT

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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, their countrymen, and change the course of history by Hitler 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.

his

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CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

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WINTER 2023 / VOL. 33, NO. 1

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MAILBAG

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In the summer of 1972, I was a 14-year-old boy traveling with my parents on an airplane trip from Mexico City to the island of Cozumel. Along the way, our plane touched down on a landing strip somewhere in the Mexican jun gle. Off to the side of the clearing I saw maybe six B-25s. I exited our airplane and made my way to them. They all had American markings. One belly hatch was open, and I crawled up and sat in the pilot’s seat and then the bombar dier’s seat and then someone was yelling at me in Spanish. Reluctantly, I exited the bomber and made my way back to the commuter plane.

WINTER 2023 5 COLLECTION/ALAMYHISTORYAVIATION

ONE CATCH

MiG MATTERS

The feature “Foxbat Follies” in the Autumn 2022 issue is a great bit of aviation history with esoteric details that are generally not re ported. However, on page 31, the intake cones of the SR-71’s engines are incorrectly described as moving forward “to choke off the exces sive inflow.” In fact, the cones moved aft to provide the optimum inlet contraction ratio at Mach 3.2.

Hank California,CarusoMaryland

erama” nose. Finally, it was Mantz who flew N1203 through the volcano caldera and shot all the films credited until he joined forces with Tallman in 1961.

Years later, someone told me that the planes were from Catch-22 and that the studio bought them from the Guatemalan Air Force, deco rated them, filmed them and then stored them somewhere until buyers could be found. I have been telling that story for the last half-cen tury. I will accept your article as being more accurate than what “someone” told me.

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

Craig Thorson Fort Worth, Texas

MORE FIRSTS

Dave Hood Del Rio, Texas

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force’s Foxbat (and the only MiG-25 in the U.S.) is currently in storage awaiting display. It has been suggested that we not restore it, but rather display it as found in Iraq. The suggested display would be rather simple: minimum clean ing, tow to the Cold War Gallery, bring in a couple of dump trucks with sand, and display her as we found her… and tell the story.

To give credit where it is due in author Mark Carlson’s otherwise excellent article “The Catch of Catch-22” (Autumn 2022): Paul Mantz, not Frank Tallman, rescued B-25H, 43-4643 (along with 474 other surplus aircraft) from Stillwa ter, Oklahoma, in the spring of 1946. It was also Mantz who converted it into the specialized camera ship he nicknamed “The Smasher,” and it was Mantz and his team who developed and constructed the “Cin

And indeed, it might have been. An old friend of mine (now passed) was an engineer at the A.V. Roe firm in Canada in the 1950s when they were designing the AVRO CF-105 Arrow, at the time the most ad vanced interceptor (no, the most advanced airplane) on the planet. To hear him tell the tale, plant security was abysmal. There were so many Soviet operatives, they had to wear pink carnations to avoid stealing from each other! The upshot is, similarities between the MiG-25 Ar rowski and the AVRO CF-105 are, well, rather striking and might be more than just coincidental.

Frank Beavercreek,Alfter Ohio

Paul Mantz (top) works on “The Smasher” in February 1953.

Your correction to Steve Suddaby’s letter (Autumn 2022) regarding the bombing of Ploesti by Zeppelins during World War I is itself in correct. Halverson was not even close to being the first to bomb Ploesti during World War II—although a couple of his aircraft were the first Americans to bomb Ploesti during the war. The Soviet air and naval air forces bombed Ploesti repeatedly during June-August 1941, a year prior to the HALPRO mission. As Dr. Robert Forczyk points out in his excellent book Sevastopol 1942, the July 13, 1941, Soviet Naval Aviation bombing of a Ploesti refinery destroyed nearly 9,000 tons of oil. The six Soviet medium bombers on this mission caused FAR more damage than HALPRO, which accomplished nothing other than mov ing piles of dirt around.

David H. Shenandoah,KlausVirginia

While Stephan Wilkinson’s description of the MiG-25’s shortcomings is unassailable, it does not obviate the fact that it sported some un characteristically advanced features. MiG OKB leapfrogged from its homely little winged mailing tube fighters to sophisticated equip ment perfectly comfortable in 21st-century airspace. One would al most think the firm had been, er, inspired by outside influence.

was getting ready to attack it when he was hit, either by a third Me-110 or by Dutch anti-aircraft fire. Badly wounded, Roos abandoned his plane, parachuted to earth and was rushed to a hospital in TheLeiden.Egmond family chose the markings No. 229 for their D.XXI. The original may not be able to fly again, but an immaculate substitute can now fly in its place. —Jon Guttman

A longstanding family dream came to fruition on May 23, 2022, when a perfect replica of a Fokker D.XXI took off from Hoogeveen Airport in the Netherlands, with Jack van Egmond Jr. at the controls. He and his father, Jack Sr., and his nephew, Tom Wilps, had devoted thousands of hours poring over orig inal drawings and reconstructing the principal Dutch fighter from World War II.

BRIEFING 6 WINTER 2023 ALAMYREBACZ-GREGOPLANE;GRZEGORZG.DENIK.CZ;SERVICE;PARKNATIONALLEFT:TOPFROMCLOCKWISEWINGSVINTAGEEGMONDBOTH: AVHP-WINTER-BRIEFING.indd 6 8/26/22 1:21 PM

On the day the Germans invaded the Netherlands, May 10, 1940, Ser geant Frans Looyen of the 2nd Jachtvliegtuigafdeling flew No. 229 against several German aircraft before being attacked by Messerschmitt Me-109Es. He was driven down east of Rotterdam by Unteroffizier Mat thias Massmann of 7th Staffel, Jagdgeschwader 26. D.XXI 229 was evi dently repaired by the next day, however, as it joined four others in attacks on a Junkers Ju-52/3m, only to be attacked again by 12 Messer schmitt Me-110Cs of 1st Staffel, Zerstörergeschwader 1. His plane badly damaged, 229’s pilot, Sergeant Jacobus Roos, detached his canopy as he prepared to bail out, only to see it fly back and strike an engine on the Me-110 that was tailing him, forcing the German to disengage. Flying in and out of a cloud, Roos found himself on the tail of another Me-110 and

Jack van Egmond Sr. (standing third from left) and son Jack Jr. (kneeling, center) enjoy the feeling of a job well done with the rest of their team in front of their Fokker D.XXI replica, which flew for the first time on May 23, 2022. One original D.XXI remains today but it is not in flying condition.

There is only a single intact original Fokker D.XXI left in the world (at the Finnish Air Force Museum) in spite of the plane’s brief but spirited de fense against German invasion in May 1940 and its longer, more successful career in the Finnish air force half a year ear lier. However, the remnants of the engine and cockpit of D. XXI No. 229, which were discovered in 1993, are now preserved in the CRASH Air War and Resistance Museum ’40-’45 near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

FOKKER D.XXI REPLICA TAKES TO THE AIR

Built in 1943 and bearing the civil reg istration code 00-HUR at the time of the crash, the plane at Tocna had been across the Atlantic more than once and flown by several owners before the museum bought it. In 2021 museum volunteers in stalled four non-firing 20mm cannons and marked the plane as Hurricane Mark IIc BE-150 JX-E of No. 1 Squadron, as flown by Karel Kuttelwascher, the Czech ace of aces and highest-scoring night intruder pilot in the Royal Air Force, with 18 victo ries in World War II. —Jon Guttman

At half past noon on July 21, 1948, a Boeing B-29 descended onto the sur face of Lake Mead, the Nevada reservoir behind Hoover Dam. In a gentle descent at just above its 220-mph cruise speed, the Superfortress skipped once for about 200 yards, hit again, tore off three of its four engines, and began its slow descent to the lake bottom. The five-man crew boarded two life rafts and was soon rescued, the sole injury a crewman’s broken arm.

What then? The National Park Service is the wreck’s official custodian and it will have to guard it from looters. It’s doubtful that any private war bird salvor/restorer will offer to take on the project. The NPS has nomi nated the site as a National Historic Landmark, and if that is approved, the Lake Mead B-29 will become untouchable.

“Keep it super-simple. If something isn’t designed into an aircraft it can’t go wrong.”

These days, Lake Mead is emptying as the American Southwest under goes an extended drought. The retreating waters have revealed cars, boats and even bodies entombed in oil drums, and eventually the B-29 will also surface. As of this writing, it rests under 60 feet of water and is expected to emerge in about a year, if the drought continues.

Lake Mead’s B-29

—BILL LEAR PBWINTER 2023 ALAMYREBACZ-GREGOPLANE;GRZEGORZG.DENIK.CZ;SERVICE;PARKNATIONALLEFT:TOPFROMCLOCKWISEWINGSVINTAGEEGMONDBOTH: AVHP-WINTER-BRIEFING.indd 7 8/30/22 8:52 AM

The Air Force sanitized the crash by concluding that it was caused by an improperly set altimeter, but since this took place in daylight over a lake surrounded by desert bluffs, the pilot was obviously flat-hatting, just an other airman trying to set the absolute record for the lowest flight ever.

AIR QUOTE

Hurricane and Pilot Lost

Outspoken underwater-recovery expert Taras Lyssenko, who has ex humed World War II Navy aircraft from Lake Michigan, is dismayed. “If a historic aircraft is allowed to stay in a water environment, it will deterio rate and crumble to nothing,” he told Aviation History. “The people who manage national parks are the wrong people to manage this project if they can’t understand that. That aircraft should be recovered and stabilized and put on public display. I wish our government cared more about its history, but they don’t seem to, and I don’t know if there’s anybody else out there who does.”

—Stephan Wilkinson

The air classics community suffered a double loss on August 14, 2022, when a Hawker Hurricane Mark IV crashed at the airfield at Cheb, in the Karlovy Vary re gion of the Czech Republic. Owned by the Aviation Museum at Tocna, the World War II fighter-bomber was helping commemo rate “Aviation Days in Cheb” when it sud denly lost altitude in a low turn and crashed into a house behind the airfield. The pilot, Petr Pačes (above), died in the accident, but there were no other serious injuries. Pačes had been flying gliders since age 14 and airplanes since 17, pilot ing MiG-21s until 1992 and subsequently serving as captain in Boeing 737s.

CAREER CHANGE 8 WINTER 2023 ARCHIVES;HISTORYNETLEFT:TOPFROMCLOCKWISE PICTURESSONYMUSEUM;SPACEANDAIRNATIONALSMITHSONIAN’SNEWSSTAMPLAWRENCE/LINN’SKENBOTTOM:HUNTINGTON;TOMPHOTOS:TOP AVHP-WINTER-BRIEFING.indd 8 8/26/22 1:21 PM

Top: The “Fabulous Flamingo” is what Gino Lucci calls his hybrid airplane/motorhome. Above: Lucci (right) poses with his son Giacinto Jr. in front of the creation. The younger Lucci was the one who found the airplane they salvaged.

A

Gino Lucci is used to getting double takes when he hits the road in his custom motorhome. After all, how often do you see the nose of a Douglas DC-3 driving down the highway? Lucci, an Air Force veteran who salvages airplanes and sells their parts through his company, Round Engine Aero, says an airplane motor home had been a dream of his since he saw something similar on a TV show as a kid. The dream began coalescing after his son, Giacinto Jr., found the DC-3 (actually an R4D, the Navy version of the Army’s DC-3-derived C-47) in Missouri, where the retired Federal Aviation Administration airplane had suffered damage from a tornado, and the elder Lucci spent about a year and a half persuading the owner to sell it. Sale completed, Lucci and his son got to work in May 2019 to mount the severed nose section onto a truck chassis so that the slightly twisted fuselage would be stable on the road. Lucci calls the process “hillbilly sci entific.” He says, “Okay, so it’s not on the frame straight, but aerodynami cally, she’s about as good as you’re going to get.” It took 14 months of work, but the Luccis had the hybrid vehicle ready for its “shakedown” cruise in 2021, when Lucci drove it from Michigan to Texas, back to Michigan and then all the way to Maine and back. Sometimes dreams do come true.

on November 1, 1911, and was the only one marked as having reached Pasadena, California, with Rodgers on November 5, and the only one to leave the United States when a C.F. Threle sent it to his stamp-fancying brother-inlaw, Otto Hunter, in Cologne, Germany. The card (and stamp) now belongs to the collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum. —Jon Guttman

Like the more famous stamp with the upside-down misprint of a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the Vin Fiz stamps became sought-after rarities. Only 13 are known to exist: most on postcards or pieces of postcards, one cover and one apparently unused specimen. At a special auction focusing on “The Pioneers of Flight” held at Shreves Philatelic Galleries Inc. in November 2006, the cover sold for $70,000, while two of the postcards went for $60,000 and a third for $47,500. The most unique of the postcards (pic tured above) was purchased when Rodgers stopped in Willcox, Arizona,

—Tom Huntington

VINHybridTrueFIZSTAMPS

During the 1911 contest to become the first to cross the United States by air (see page 36), Mabel Rodgers, wife of the first pilot destined to complete the trek, had the foresight to produce and sell semi-official postage stamps depicting Calbraith Rodgers’ Wright XE Vin Fiz . They sold for 25 cents each, with customers able to purchase them at Rodgers’ scheduled stops so the airman could fly them to his next destination to be posted. The U.S. Post Office did not object to the presence of the “Rodgers Aerial Post” on letters and covers...provided they had official USPO stamps as well.

AERO ARTIFACT

The action on the invasion’s first day marked the first time in his tory that American-built airplanes squared off against each other in war. An early clash saw Wildcats of Ranger’s VF-41 squadron taking on French Hawks—several of which were from Groupe de Chasse II/5, a direct descendant of the renowned “Escadrille Lafayette” of mostly American volunteer pilots who fought for France before the U.S. formally entered World War I. Both sides took their lumps during the air battles, but the French force was unable to mount any defense by November 10. At 10:00 pm that night, Vichy headquarters in Casablanca ordered the French to cease hostilities. Those same Vichy airmen were soon fighting for the Allies as the Free French in the renewed effort to liberate their country. —Larry Porges

In other museum news, the Flying Heri tage & Combat Armor Museum at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, will reopen sometime in 2023. The museum closed in May 2020 because of the COVID-19 pan demic. Its collection, previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died in 2018, was purchased this year by the Wartime History Museum, a nonprofit started by Steuart Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton. The collec tion’s 23 airplanes include a Supermarine Spitfire and a North American P-51 Mus tang. “We hope to share these important artifacts for generations to come and un earth inspiring stories to help fuel innova tion, understanding, and exploration,” said Walton in a statement.

KNOW THY ENEMY

MILESTONES

The National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., closed for renovation since March 2022, will par tially reopen on October 14, when the west half the building with eight new exhibition galleries, plus the planetarium, store and café, will become available to the public.

ReopenMuseums

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The eight galleries will be “America by Air,” “Destination Moon,” “Early Flight” (pictured above), “Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets,” “Nation of Speed,” “One World Connected,” “Thomas W. Haas We All Fly,” and “Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age.” New artifacts on display will include the T-38 that Jackie Cochran used to become the first woman to fly faster than sound, Jon Sharp’s Sharp DR 90 Nemesis air racer and a full-size X-Wing from 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Sky walker. Visitors will need timed tickets for entry. The remainder of the museum’s res toration is expected to last until 2025. The museum’s website about the renovation is airandspace.si.edu/about-transformation

Based on the book by Adam Makos, the movie Devotion is scheduled for release on November 23, 2022. It tells the story of Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), the U.S. Navy’s first African American pilot. Brown died after being hit by ground fire over Korea, despite a rescue attempt by squadron commander Thomas J. Hudner Jr. (Glen Powell).

Eighty years ago, on No vember 8, 1942, the Allies launched Operation Torch, the amphibious invasion of French North Africa and the first major U.S. foray into World War II’s Euro pean theater. An American aircraft carrier, USS Ranger, and four escort carriers brought 109 Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat fighters, 36 Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive bombers and 27 Grumman TBF-1 Avenger torpedo bombers to support the Western Task Force off Morocco. Facing the Americans were Vichy French forces with 208 aircraft, 84 of which had been built in the U.S. and delivered to the French before their 1940 capitulation to Germany. The Vichy air arsenal included Douglas DB-7 attack bombers, Martin 167 Maryland light bombers and Curtiss H-75A fighters, export versions of P-36A Hawks.

These inpilotsFranceflewCurtissU.S-built75HawksforVichyagainstU.S.andairplanesNorthAfrica.

Located near Hollywood Burbank Airport, the Pierce Brothers Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine commemorates 13 aviators and one of the shrine’s founders. The shrine also includes memorials to space shuttle astronauts and others who made aviation history.

Twenty-nine years after it was built, the portal was dedicated as a

BY DENNIS K. JOHNSON

All pilots must make that mysterious final flight and leave their mortal remains behind. Some choose to have their ashes scat tered over a favorite airfield, while military pilots might land at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. So, how did 14 aviation pio neers come to rest beneath a Spanish-style arch in Burbank,StandingCalifornia?just500 yards from the threshold of Runway 33 at Hollywood Burbank Airport is the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation, a 75-foot-tall Spanish Mission Revival gate built as an impressive entrance to the Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park cemetery. Erected in 1924 (and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998), the portal is large enough to be considered a rotunda, a building with a circular ground plan that is sometimes cov ered by a dome. This portal has four passages open to the outside, se cured by iron gates at night, a colorful tiled mosaic dome and an exterior decorated with ornate stone castings of plants and allegorical figures. The dome’s interior is decorated with stars, an appropriate motif in a memorial to people who loved the sky.

BURBANK’S PORTAL OF THE FOLDED WINGS SHRINE TO AVIATION HONORS PIONEERS OF THE AIR

THE LAYOVERFINAL

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resting place and memorial to pilots and other pioneers of flight. The dedication took place on December 17, 1953, the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. The ceremony included the interment of the ashes of Walter Brookins (1889-1953), the first pilot trained by the Wright brothers for their exhibi tion team and the first to fly above one mile in altitude. Since then, 13 more aviation pioneers and the portal’s chaplain have been interred

coins are different than the originals because they’re struck in 99.9% fine silver instead of 90% silver/10% copper, and they were struck using modern technology, serving to enhance the details of the iconic design.

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GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2022 GovMint.com. All rights reserved. SPECIAL CALL-IN ONLY OFFER The U.S. Mint Just Struck Morgan Silver Dollars for the First Time in 100 Years! O PRIVY MARK GovMint.com • 1300 Corporate Center Curve, Dept. NSD254-02, Eagan, MN 55121 1-888-395-3219 Offer Code NSD254-02 Please mention this code when you call. Struck in 99.9% Fine Silver! For the First Time EVER! First VERYMorgansLegal-TenderinaCentury!MorgansinaCentury!LIMITED!SoldOutattheMint! A+ To learn more, call now. First call, first served! AVHP-221011-004 GovMint 2021 Morgan Silver Dollar.indd 1 8/25/22 10:16 PM

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the last year they were minted, the U.S. Mint struck five different versions of the Morgan in 2021, paying tribute to each of the mints that struck the coin. The coins here honor the historic New Orleans Mint, a U.S. Mint branch from 1838–1861 and again from 1879–1909. These coins, featuring an “O” privy mark, a small differentiating mark, were struck in Philadelphia since the New Orleans Mint no longer exists. These beautiful

The portal also displays plaques memorializ ing other American aviators, such as Amelia Earhart, and the crews of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia . The tiny Burbank Aviation Museum is housed inside one of the arch’s pillars and exhibits photographs and memorabilia of Burbank’s aviation history.

The two earliest figures interred at the shrine are Charles Taylor (1868-1956) and John Moisant (1868-1910). Taylor may be the shrine’s most famous inhabitant, since he built the en gine that powered the Wright’s 1903 Flyer and worked as their only mechanic during the earli est years of flight. (He also served as Calbraith Rodgers’ mechanic during the first flight across the United States—see the article on page 36). Moisant was another pioneering aircraft builder and in 1910 he became the first pilot to fly a pas senger across the English Channel. Moisant’s sister, Matilde Moisant (1878-1964), an early ex hibition pilot and the second woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license, rests by herAnotherbrother.aviation

To visit the shrine, use the Valhalla Memorial Park address at 3898 Valhalla Drive in Burbank, not the cemetery’s business address, as the arch stands at the east entrance to the cemetery, not the main entrance. The portal is about a 20-minute walk from Burbank Airport’s terminal. For comic relief, walk into the cemetery to visit the graves of Oliver Hardy, the larger half of Laurel and Hardy, and “Curly Joe” DeRita of the Three Stooges. The Burbank Aviation Museum at the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation is open 1-3 p.m. on the first Sunday of each month, except for holidays or when it’s raining. Admission is free. THE (1868-1910)(1868-1956)TAYLORCHARLESARESHRINEATINTERREDFIGURESEARLIESTTWOTHEANDJOHNMOISANT Visit the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation WINTER 202312 YORKNEWBEALS/THETARBOXJESSIEFORCE;AIRU.S.IMAGES;ARCHIVE/GETTYHULTONIMAGES;GETTYVIARINHART/CORBISGEORGERIGHT:TOLEFT CONGRESSOFLIBRARYARCHIVES;NATIONALIMAGES;GETTYVIABILDKESTER/ULLSTEINPHILIPPIMAGES;SOCIETY/GETTYHISTORICAL AVHP-WINTER-AVIATOR.indd 12 8/26/22 1:23 PM

of Aeronautics and organized the first Women’s National Air Derby; Carl Squier (1893-1967) was a World War I pilot and vice president of the Lockheed Aircraft Company. The most recent in ternee, arriving in 1994, was Richard DellaVedowa (1917-1994), a Lockheed engineer. (The ashes of Jimmie Angel, the pilot who discovered Venezuela’s Angel Falls by airplane in 1933, were interred at the shrine until his family had them removed and scattered over the falls that bear his name in 1960.) One person at the shrine who wasn’t a famous pilot or aircraft designer is the Reverend John Carruthers (1889-1960), the first chaplain of the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine. He was an amateur aviation historian and one of the people who proposed the memorial.

under the arch. They include an aircraft me chanic, dirigible pilot, parachute jumper and numerous aircraft designers.

pioneer beneath the dome is Bertrand Acosta (1895-1951), who copiloted Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1927 transatlantic flight. Many early pilots were also aircraft designers and inventors, including Mark Campbell (18971963), a 1920s barnstorming pilot and aircraft designer; Warren Eaton (1891-1966), who built airplanes for Lincoln Beachey and worked for Glenn Curtiss; Bert Kinner (1882-1957), founder of Kinner Airplane & Motor Corporation; and Roy Knabenshue (1876-1960), a manager of the Wright Brothers’ exhibition team and builder of the first passenger dirigible. J. Floyd Smith (1884-1956) was a record-setting pilot and in ventor of the first free-fall, ripcord parachute. His wife, Hilder Smith (1890-1977), an exhibi tion pilot and parachute jumper herself, rests beside him. Elizabeth McQueen (1878-1958) founded the Women’s International Association

So, how did these aviators land in Burbank? Southern California and the Los Angeles area have a long history of aircraft manufacturing. The Lockheed Aircraft Company was founded in Hollywood and moved to Burbank in 1928. Its legendary Skunk Works, where secret spy planes such as the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird were built, was located at Burbank Airport. Hughes Aircraft Company was based in nearby Glendale, and the Douglas Aircraft Company and Northrop Corporation were both founded in the Los Angeles area. It was workers from these aircraft plants who lobbied for decades to have the cem etery portal dedicated to aviation pioneers. They may be gone, but they are not forgotten.

Among the aviators who made their last stop at the Portal of the Folded Wings are (left to right) Bertrand Acosta, Matilde Moisant, Warren Eaton, Roy Knabenshue, John Moisant, Charles Taylor and Mark Campbell.

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After nearly a decade of development, in 1954 the Navy began equip ping 13 squadrons with the F7U-3 version of the carrier-based jet. But the “Gutless Cutlass” proved to be accident-prone and plagued by grem lins. Even with more powerful Westinghouse J-46 engines the big twin jet proved woefully underpowered, especially during demanding carrier approaches. It acquired a bad reputation and the Navy had withdrawn it from frontline service by late 1957.

BY ROBERT BERNIER

MIDWAY’S CUTLASS

Like many baby boomer kids, I fueled my fas

The Vought F7U Cutlass originated with a 1945 Navy fighter com petition for a carrier-based fighter able to fly at 600 mph and 40,000 feet. Vought Aircraft was known for unusual designs, and the futuristic-looking V-346A proposal was certainly that. It would be the Na vy’s first swept-wing fighter and Ameri ca’s first tailless fighter to go into production. The proposal re sulted in a contract for three XF7U-1 prototypes.

THE F7U-3 HAD A BAD REPUTATION, BUT IT WAS AN INTERESTING AIRPLANE

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Photographed on the deck of the USS Midway in 1952, this F7U-3 Cutlass bears the paint scheme that the Midway Museum will eventually give its restoration.

The prototypes of the bat-like fighter first flew in 1948 and the initial test flights were encouraging. Powered by two Westing house J-34 turbojets, the airplane promised speed and exceptional ma neuverability. But a litany of woes soon dogged the program.

RESTORATION

Phil Lavullis brought his knowledge of sheet metal and repair techniques to the Midway Museum for the Cutlass restoration project. Here he works on one of the airplane’s wings.

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Vought manufactured 307 F7Us, with production ending in 1955. Fewer than 10 of those airframes remain today and one, serial number 129565, is currently nearing the end of a restoration at San Diego’s USS Midway Museum. The Navy accepted this particular jet in 1953 and it

last served with attack squadron VA-212 aboard the carrier USS Bon Homme Richard before being retired in April 1957 with only 273 hours on the airframe. The Cutlass ended up as a gate guard at Naval Air Station Olathe, Kansas, for several years. The Midway Museum retrieved it from a Vought retiree group in Texas that had been doing restoration work.

Despite the airplane’s bad reputation, former naval aviator and longtime Midway Museum member Dick Cavicke remains a staunch defender of the jet. As a young Navy ensign in late 1954, he was assigned straight out of naval flight training to fly F7Us with VF-124. “The Cutlass was more exotic looking than anything I had ever seen, and I was anxious to fly it,” he recalls. He acquired nearly 400 hours in F7U-3s with two squadrons based at California’s NAS Miramar, making him one of the airplane’s most experienced pilots.

Midway Air Wing Project Manager Royce Moke knew he had a big job ahead of him getting the Cutlass restored for display aboard the air craft carrier museum. When asked about the biggest challenge, Moke didn’t hesitate. “Getting the wings fitted back onto the fuselage,” he said. To complicate matters, Midway’s restoration team didn’t take the airplane apart. It arrived in pieces from the previous restoration effort. Working without drawings or a maintenance manual, Moke had to figure out how to hoist the heavy wings and maneuver them into a position to fit the fuselage’s wing-mounting lugs. He was later able to enlist the help of four sailors from VRM-50, a Navy Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltro tor squadron. They volunteered their free time and used a forklift to help the restoration team get the wings on in less than half a day.

Then there were unusual elements with which the restoration crew had to deal. For example, the team refurbished the wooden skids that the Cutlass had on the fin stubs beneath the wings, which sometimes hit the carrier’s deck during landings. The replaceable hardwood skids pre vented damage to the aluminum. Needing to minimize airframe weight, Vought had patented a special fabrication process for light but rigid airframe skins called Metalite. A sandwich of balsa wood with lightweight aluminum skins glued on each side, Metalite was used around the cockpit and on the wings. Many of the balsa cores had deteriorated over the years of outdoor storage. Because the airplane would not return to flight, the team kept the Metalite panels around the cockpit area (with their compound curves) in place. For the wing panels, they re placed the Metalite with aluminum skins of roughly the same thickness and used metal spac ers to make up for any differences.

Entering Midway’s restoration hangar in the spring of 2021, I was immediately impressed by the project’s scale. Cutlass parts were scattered throughout the hangar. The airplane’s large, broad wings with tall vertical fins were detached and they and the 40-foot-long fuselage crowded one side of the hangar. The nine-foot nose gear strut—one of the Cutlass’s problematic design features—landing gear doors, dive brakes and miscellaneous bits and pieces occupied the other side. The sounds of rivet guns and grinders echoed through the hangar as restoration volun teers worked on the jet.

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cination with aviation with model airplanes and one my favorites was the F7U with its bulbous canopy and spindly nose gear. So, I made plans to look in on the Cutlass restoration project.

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The team enlisted the help of four sailors from a tiltrotor squadron and used a forklift to get the Cutlass’ wings attached. Making the entire project more difficult was the lack of engineering drawings or even a maintenance manual. Once painted, the restored Cutlass will be a rare example of the unusual and sometimes problematic carrier-based airplane.

The projected completion date for this rare carrier fighter is late 2022. “Painted on one side of the cockpit will be the name of former Cutlass pilot, and the airplane’s sponsor, Bill Montague,” said Hanson. “And on the other side, Wally Schirra’s name, the friend and mentor who taught Mon tague to fly the jet.” Schirra went on to become one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and he also flew Gemini and Apollo missions, but I think it’s a safe bet that he never forgot what it was like to fly the Cutlass.

Luckily for the restoration effort, San Diego is a Navy town with many motivated and skilled aircraft technicians. Among them is Phil Lavullis, an aircraft sheet metal worker with 30 years’ experience repairing dam aged aircraft around the world. “I always liked working on things with my hands and restoring something that’s rare and among the last of its kind is motivating,” he told me. But Lavullis found the Cutlass to be especially challenging: “There’s nothing to go on, no blueprints or another Cutlass nearby that we can take measurements from.”

As of this writing, the Cutlass has been reassembled and needs only its livery. “Our Cutlass will be displayed in the silver metal scheme of the plane used in the August 1952 carrier qualification tests aboard the USS Midway,” said museum curator David Hanson. And he added, “We want a Cutlass because it’s an interesting aircraft and not many are on public display in this part of the U.S.”

in prison, from 1938 until 1946, for his associa tion with Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was executed for treason in 1937, and because Joseph Stalin’s regime accused him, probably falsely, of spying for Italian dictator Benito Mus solini—even though it was the rise of Mussolini that had prompted Bartini to leave Italy. Even while in prison, Bartini worked as an aircraft en gineer and designer, including contributing to the development of the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber.

THE VVA-14 TRIED TO DO TOO MUCH WITH TOO LITTLE

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The Bartini-Beriev VVA-14 was intended to operate in ground effect. Below: Its designer, Robert Ludvigovich Bartini (photographed in 1973), moved to the Soviet Union in 1923, where he contributed to several ground-breaking aero designs.

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Enter Robert Bartini. Born in Austria-Hungary (in what is now Cro atia) in 1897, the illegitimate son of a baron, Bartini served in the Aus tro-Hungarian army during World War I and spent time as a Russian prisoner-of-war. After the war, Bartini made his way to Italy and be came an aviation engineer and designer. He joined the Italian Commu nist Party before the rise of Italian fascism compelled him to leave for the Soviet Union in 1923. His career in his adopted country was both impressive and tragic; Bartini played a major role in the design and manufacture of 60 aircraft and aircraft projects, but he also spent years

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union was greatly concerned about the United States’ submarinelaunched Polaris missiles. The ballistic weapons carried small, rela tively lightweight hydrogen bombs that could hit targets more than 2,000 miles away from their launch sites. Even more concerning, submarines could launch the missiles while remaining submerged. The Soviets were highly motivated to develop the means to identify, attack and de stroy those submarines.

In 1959, the “rehabilitated” Bartini turned his attention to the problems of identifying and at tacking ballistic missile submarines. Aided by the Beriev Design Bureau, his solution was the VVA-14, one of the most unconventional aircraft of the twentieth century. Bartini envisioned the

BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER

A DRAGONSOVIET

In retrospect, VVA-14 seems to have been a victim of its own extravagance. The plane was too large, too heavy and was required to fill too many roles. With so many different, and novel, technologies crammed into a single design—any one of which may have needed its own airframe to fully vet—it’s easy to understand why the proj ect was cancelled. VVA-14 is perhaps best re membered as a testbed for a plethora of diver gent technologies, all welded into a single chi mera-like aircraft.

VVA-14 as a massive amphibious aircraft capable of horizontal or vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) that could conduct a wide range of coastal patrol duties and attack surface and sub merged vessels from high or low altitudes. The letters “VVA” are derived from a Soviet acronym for “vertical take-off amphibious aircraft.”

Bartini died two years later at the age of 77 (the cause of his death was not made public). Without his backing, the program found itself

short of funding but still managed to limp along for two more years. The VTOL engines never materialized but the VVA-14 made 100 conven tional flights. The Soviets had planned to build three aircraft but only one was completed. Even tually, the government stopped funding the pro gram and the aircraft fell into disrepair. Cur rently, the VVA-14 airframe is on display at the Central Air Force Museum near Moscow, where it sits partially dismantled and minus its wing but with pontoons still affixed. Plans to restore the airframe never bore fruit.

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The Bartini-Beriev VVA-14 was both gargan tuan and bizarre looking. The aircraft was nick named “Zmei Gorynich” because of its resem blance to a mythological multi-headed dragon of that name. With a wingspan of almost 100 feet and a length of 85 feet, the craft featured a high, straight-wing configuration and a long, protrud ing cockpit. Atop the wing were two large Solo viev D-30M turbofan cruising engines, each of which could produce 15,000 pounds of thrust. Starting engines were to be housed on each side of the nose. Enormous pontoons under the wing and on each side of the fuselage would facilitate seaborne operations. The undercarriage housed a nose gear and a main landing gear for conven tional takeoff and landing (using hardware from Tu-22 bombers). VVA-14 could carry 34,000 pounds of fuel in two giant tanks. The planned VTOL engines, 12 Rybinsk RD-36-35 lift turbo fans generating 9,700 pounds of thrust each, would occupy a large center space and use a se ries of air nozzles distributed across the air frame to propel the craft into the air. VVA-14 was designed to carry and deploy torpedoes, bombs and mines. Astonishingly, the imposing craft re quired only a crew of three—a pilot, navigator and weapons officer. VVA-14 had a service ceil ing of approximately 30,000 feet.

Top: Bartini believed the “Zmei Gorynich” would be the perfect machine to seek and destroy lootingsufferedMuseumRussia’sdamagedVVA-14rines.missile-carryingPolarissubmaAbove:ThesurvivingprototypewasenroutetoCentralAirForceandhassincetheindignitiesofandvandalism.

Bartini’s airplane first flew in 1972. The air craft was considered a success even though it had serious problems, including severe vibra tion from the two large Soloviev cruising en gines, which caused significant buffeting and even broke the landing gear doors. At first the VVA-14 had inflatable pontoons (an unorthodox idea championed by Bartini himself). While those pontoons did work, they were ultimately replaced with rigid metal ones.

VVA-14 was designed to be a wing-in-ground effect (WIG) vehicle. Such aircraft take advan tage of the increase in lift that aircraft experi ence when flying close to the surface, especially when that surface is extremely flat (such as a runway or the sea). Aircraft designers had noted that straight-wing aircraft often functioned well as WIG aircraft, hence VVA-14’s straight wings.

In The Spirit of St. Louis , director Billy Wilder and screenwriter Wendell Mayes fleshed out the story of Charles Lindbergh’s New York-to-Paris flight with flashbacks of Lindbergh’s aviation career. Here the film crew shoots a barnstorming sequence. Below: Designer Charles Eames was a friend of Wilder’s and worked on the production as a photographer.

To play the Lone Eagle, Wilder hired James Stewart. It was perfect

Designers Charles and Ray Eames are known for the modernistic chair that bears their names, but the married couple were also close friends with film director Billy Wilder (whose credits in cluded Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard). In 1955 Wilder asked Charles to join him as a photographic consultant on his latest project. The film was The Spirit of St. Louis, Wilder’s adapta tion of Charles Lindbergh’s 1953 book about his life and his famous solo hop across the Atlantic in 1927. Eames shot candid photos of the film’s production, images that have rarely if ever been published until now.

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The Jewish Wilder was eager to take on the film, despite Lindbergh’s troubling isolationist and arguably anti-Semitic politics in the years leading up to World War II. When Wilder and Lindbergh flew to Wash ington to see the original Spirit at the Smithsonian Institution prior to filming, their flight hit turbulence. The puckish Wilder leaned over to Lindbergh and said, “Mr. Lindbergh, would it not be embarrassing if we crashed and the headlines said, ‘Lone Eagle and Jewish Friend in Plane Crash’?” Even more troubling for Wilder than Lindbergh’s past was the director’s inability to penetrate the aviator’s character. “There was a wall there,” he said.

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casting—or it would have been, had Wilder made the film 20 years earlier. The real Lindbergh was only 25 when he made his flight; at the start of the shoot Stewart was more than two decades older.The production was troubled and Wilder lost interest before shooting ended in 1957, with di rector John Sturges stepping in for an uncred ited role shooting some final scenes. The film failed at the box office when released later that year and Wilder himself remained disappointed by what he once called his worst film. Still, direc tor Cameron Crowe, who published a book of his conversations with Wilder, felt differently. “Wilder’s much underrated color portrait of Lindbergh’s famous journey is a sumptuous bi opic,” he wrote. Charles Eames’ photographs provide a fascinating look behind the scenes.

SCENESTHEBEHIND

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Above: Wilder was already an acclaimed director by the time he started work on The Spirit of St. Louis, with films like Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945) and Stalag 17 (1953) on his résumé. Here he seems to be mistaking an exhaust on one of the movie’s Spirit of St. Louis replicas for a camera’s viewfinder. Left: The movie built two flying versions of the Spirit of St. Louis as well as this static model for scenes on the ground. One of the flying replicas is now on display at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and the other is at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. The static model used to hang in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and is now owned by Wings of the North in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

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Top: Actor James Stewart was a pilot himself and flew 20 combat missions in B-24s during World War II. He considered the part of Lindbergh the role of a lifetime. Here he sits in the cockpit of a de Havilland DH-4 that was used for a flashback airmail sequence. Above: Stewart hangs from a parachute in the studio as he depicts Lindbergh’s descent from his airmail plane. When finishing the scene on location, the wind caught Stewart’s parachute and dragged him 50 feet across the ground. Right: The crew shoots another barnstorming sequence with a Curtiss Jenny.

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Left: A scene with a Pathé News crew and their airplane did not make it into the final film. Below: Studio crew prepare to position some stunt trees while actor Murray Hamilton waits for his cue at the wing of a Jenny. Hamilton, later known as the mayor in the movie Jaws, played Lindbergh’s real-life friend and fellow barnstormer, Harlan “Bud” Gurney. The character appeared in only one scene in the movie, in which he and Lindbergh talked about their mutual love of flying. The real Gurney, who ended his flying career in 1965 as a pilot for United Airlines, served as a technical advisor on the movie.

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Above: The Warner Bros. crew applies some last-minute makeup to actor Hamilton. While much of the film was shot on sets, some of the movie was filmed on location, mostly in California. The scene of Lindbergh’s arrival at Le Bourget Airport, though, was filmed in France, although at a different airport near Versailles.

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Right: Wilder, seated on the fence, converses with some of his crew between setups. At one point during the shoot star James Stewart bet Wilder he wouldn’t dare attempt wing walking. Wilder had himself strapped to the top wing of a biplane and won the bet, donating his winnings to charity.

INC./ALAMYCOLLECTION,EVERETTRIGHT:

Left: In the end, the film proved to be a box office disappointment. By the end of 1957 it had earned back only $2.6 million, after having cost the studio $6 million. Wilder himself called the experience of shooting it “horrendous” and said, “I never should have made this picture.” Screenwriter Wendell Mayes thought the problem was that no one knew what the title meant and that people thought the movie “was an old musical.” Above: The Spirit of St. Louis became almost a character in the movie itself. Lindbergh spent more than 33 hours alone in the airplane’s cramped cockpit on his transatlantic flight, and dramatizing that proved challenging when writing the screenplay. One solution was to have Lindbergh talk to a fly that took refuge in the airplane. “Mr. Stewart did not object to talking to insects,” said Wilder. “After all, he had to deal all of his life with agents and producers.” Below: The scene of Lindbergh’s takeoff from Roosevelt Field in New York was actually filmed at Santa Maria, California.

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Once you learn more about the photo, though, it becomes apparent that it tells us a lot about how rapidly aviation has advanced.

In 1923, pilots of the U.S. Army Air Services made the first nonstop flight across the United States. It took them 27 hours. Forty-six years later, American astronauts were walking on the moon, and their trip of almost a quarter-million miles to reach lunar orbit took about three days—a fraction of the time it took Rodgers just to fly across the country. That’s an amazing amount of technological advancement for such a short amount of time.

Orville died on January 30, 1948, less than four years after this photograph was taken. By then the world had seen the development of the great piston-engine airplanes of World War II, the breaking of the sound barrier and the rise of jets like the Grumman F9F-5 Panther that Royce Williams was flying when he shot down four MiG-15s in one encounter (see page 52). That’s a lot of aviation history packed into a sin gle lifetime.

FROM THE COCKPIT

The elder Wright brother died in 1912, a victim of typhoid fever. Orville lived on, although he never piloted an airplane again after he nearly died in a crash in 1908. (His passenger, Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, was not so fortunate and he became the first air plane fatality.)

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At first glance, there’s nothing extraordinary about this photograph. It just shows an older man about to climb into an airplane that be longs to the United States Army Air Forces.

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In the photo here, Orville is climbing up to board a U.S. Army Air Forces Lockheed C-69, the military version of the Constellation air liner. The big airplane was powered by four Wright R-3350-35 Du plex-Cyclone engines, each capable of generating 2,200 horsepower. In comparison, the Wrights’ first engine, designed by mechanic Charles Taylor, had been capable of 12 horsepower. The Lockheed had a wingspan of 123 feet—longer than the distance Orville covered on that first flight in 1903. Wright did sit at the controls of the Lock heed for a brief time while in flight. “I guess I ran the whole plane for a minute but I let the machine take care of itself,” he said afterwards. “I always said airplanes would fly themselves if you left them alone.”

TIME PASSAGES

BY TOM HUNTINGTON

UNIVERSITYSTATEWRIGHT

Steve Wartenberg’s feature in this issue about Calbraith Perry Rodgers and the first flight made across the United States (page 36) should make you think about how rapidly the airplane evolved. Rodgers made his epic journey in 1911, just shy of eight years after the first flights at Kitty Hawk. The journey was grueling. Rodgers crashed over and over again, causing serious injuries to him self and his Wright Model EX. His flight across the country took 49 days. Rodgers died in an air plane crash only a few months later.

The man in the photo is Orville Wright, who had invented the air plane with his older brother, Wilbur. At the time he was photo graphed, on April 26, 1944, Orville was 72 years old. Just over 40 years earlier the brothers had made the first heavier-than-air, controlled and powered flight of an airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville is piloting the craft in the iconic photograph taken on December 17, 1903, with Wilbur standing off to the side as he watches history being made. The flight captured in that photograph covered 120 feet and lasted all of 20 seconds.

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BILL LEAR NEVER DESIGNED AN AIRPLANE. HE DIDN’T HAVE TO BY STEPHAN WILKINSON THE LEAR OF LEARJET

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Frank Sinatra (right) and Dean Martin epitomize 1960s cool, helped by the presence of Sinatra’s Learjet. Spearheaded by quirky genius Bill Lear, the twin-engine Learjet (originally spelled as two words) became a symbol of luxury business travel—even though you couldn’t stand up in one.

ou probably use one of William P. Lear’s inven tions every day. No, not a Learjet—unless you’re richer than we reckon—but the practical, af fordable, compact car radio.

It all started with Bill Lear’s prototype of an AM radio receiver small enough to fit into a 1920s automobile, which ultimately led to the development of a mega-billion-dollar corporation called Motorola. Lear, as was his wont, moved on to more challenging problems while Motorola was still a ga rage-size shop, and he continued through a lifetime of peaks and valleys to increase his patent tally—127 of them, some for major inventions, some for pointless trifles—by the time he died in 1978.

Bill Lear is popularly assumed to have been the designer of the Learjet, but he could no more have designed an airplane than an itinerant aviation writer could knock out a lightweight autopilot. (Such an autopilot was one of Lear’s greatest achievements.) Lear simply decided that the world needed a small, light and comparatively inexpensive business jet, and he hired good engineers to do the heavy lifting. The resulting Learjet became popular shorthand for any business aircraft. “Saying Learjet is like saying Kleenex even if the business aircraft on the ramp, like the tissue paper on the counter, is a different brand,” wrote Walter Boyne and Philip Handle man in The 25 Most Influential Aircraft of All Time. Owning a Learjet also became a winged symbol of success. Frank Sinatra bought one and enjoyed loaning it to his famous friends; golfer Arnold Palmer had one; Carly Simon mentioned the Learjet in her hit song “You’re So Vain.”

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But Lear’s forte was electronics, not airplane design. It was once said that the great Lockheed aerodynamicist Kelly Johnson could “see” air, and perhaps Lear could see electricity. He de signed lightweight avionics for general aviation, and he was the first to make light planes true traveling machines, able to fly long distances through bad weather and good, with navigation radios to help pilots find their way. Until Bill Lear came along, only airliners and some mili tary aircraft carried radios.

Right: Bill Lear receives congratulations from President Harry S. Truman in 1949 after winning the Robert J. Collier Trophy (behind them) for his work developing an autopilot. Above: Lear entered the realm of business travel when he began converting Lockheed Lodestars into plusher versions he called Learstars.

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Lear may not have been an aeronautical engi neer, but he was many other things: an entrepre neur and visionary, a salesman who could sell a stereo to a deaf Inuit, a serial philanderer, charmer and best friend of everyone he met, par ticularly the journalists who watered at his trough. His formal education ended after eighth

grade, but as one engineer friend said, “Bill didn’t have the limitations of an education. He didn’t know what couldn’t be done.”

Lear also had a colorful personal life. He was never classically handsome and became increas ingly pudgy as he aged, but he often had lots of money and always had lots of charisma. Both attracted women. He never lacked for mis tresses. His fourth wife, Moya, once made him a needlepoint adorned with the names of 13 of his girlfriends—not a complete list, just the ones she knew about. The marriage worked well because Moya’s rule was that her husband could have all the lovers he wanted as long as he didn’t talk aboutMoyathem.was the daughter of vaudeville come dian John “Ole” Olsen, of the duo Olsen and Johnson. It has long been assumed that Bill Lear was the wit who named one of his daughters Shanda, thus condemning her to a life of being introduced as Shanda Lear, but the name was in fact grandpa Ole’s idea.

It couldn’t have been easy to be one of Lear’s children (and he had seven). Lear’s son John once crashed a Bücker Jungmann biplane while he was showing off with aerobatics above his Swiss prep school. Bill had to pay for the air plane. He never forgave John and left him $1 in his will, “which, incidentally, I never got,” John Lear recalls. John once asked his father for air fare to fly John’s girlfriend from Geneva to Los Angeles. In his excellent biography Stormy Ge nius, Richard Rashke reports that Bill said that if he paid for her trip, he and not John would be the one to sleep with her.

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Chicago airport. After selling his interest in Mo torola, in 1931 he bought a fast Monocoupe, which he flew from Chicago to Miami, trying to follow the crude Department of Commerce radio beacon system. He ran into bad weather and was fortunate to survive. Chastened, Lear called a friend to pick him up and hired a pilot to fly the Monocoupe back to Chicago. (Lear once said that if you try to fly through no-visibility weather without knowing how, “You’ll be instru ment flying for the rest of your life…about a min ute and a half.”) Lear immediately began work ing on a light, practical radio direction finder that could home in on commercial broadcast stations. He marketed it as the Learoscope but

Top: A failed Swiss fighter called the P-16 served as the initial inspiration for Lear’s business jet, although there has been debate about the extent of the debt. Center: The Learjet prototype makes its first flight on October 7, 1963. Above: With the Learjet behind him, Lear moved on to other projects, including inventing the eight-track tape. None of his other aviation ventures, though, met with the success of the Learjet.

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George C. Larson, editor emeritus of Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine, was one journal ist who covered Lear. “Bill’s overwhelming tal ent was that he knew how to charm people,” says Larson. “He never met a stranger. He was totally gregarious and always assumed that you loved him. And it stood him in good stead in front of the press, though one of his problems was that sometimes he believed his own press.”

illiam Powell Lear was born on June 26, 1902, in Hannibal, Missouri, and later moved to Chicago with his mother after she divorced. He developed a love for airplanes, even though his first flight, when he was 17, ended in a minor crash. His second ride was to be aboard a Goodyear blimp, but he was bumped by a photographer at the last min ute. The blimp crashed and the cameraman died.

Lear was undeterred. Following a stint in the Navy, he learned how to fly while working at a

In the early 1950s the U.S. Air Force lent Lear an elderly Lockheed Lodestar transport to use for testing an autopilot and approach coupler for automated instrument landings that Lear

couldn’t afford a patent attorney, so his develop ment went unprotected from competitors such as Bendix. But Lear undoubtedly contributed more to the development of the radio direction finder than any other inventor.

At the time, however, Lear’s company had a board of directors, and those directors were in terested in making money, not airplanes. They told their CEO to drop the Lodestar project. In stead, Lear went behind their backs and formed the Lear Aircraft Engineering Division. Little did the directors know that Bill was also pri vately buying run-out Lodestars and then resell ing them to his own airplane subsidiary at a handsome profit.

was developing for military aircraft. Lear called the airplane the Green Weenie but liked it enough to purchase it for pennies on the dollar. He did some drag-reduction work on the air frame and created a posh executive interior, ending up with one of the nicest corporate air planes of the time. He sold the Green Weenie for $200,000 and bought two more surplus Lode stars for $70,000. Lear gave them the same ex ecutive facelift and realized he had the makings of an airframe business.

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Lear was not an airplane designer, and he knew it. He hired some of the best-known aero nautical engineers in the business—Gordon Is rael, Ed Swearingen and Benny Howard—to turn the Lodestar into the Learstar via a redesigned wing and other modifications. With a cruise speed of 300 mph and a range of 3,800 miles, the Learstar briefly was the fastest and lon gest-range twin-engine piston airplane in the world. Finally, Bill had found his true calling— building airplanes.

In 1955, Bill and Moya moved to Switzerland. He intended to set up a European subsidiary to sell his products internationally, but he had also bought into the legend that Swiss engineers were superb. Perhaps they could help him build his next airplane, whatever it might be. His relo cation was probably hastened by the fact that his board of directors had learned about the Aircraft Engineering Division and were planning to shut

Clockwise from above: In the popular imagination, owning a Learjet became a sign of success—even better than owning a Cadillac. “Godfather of Soul” James Brown (left, with manager Ben Bart) was just one celebrity who flaunted his airplane after he bought a Model 24A in 1968. When the newly married Elvis and Priscilla Presley flew from Las Vegas to their honeymoon in Palm Springs, California, in 1967, they borrowed Sinatra’s Learjet.

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Above all, Lear loved a challenge. He left the mundanities of producing and marketing his in ventions to others while he chased new opportu nities. The greatest of these, in his mind, was the development of an airplane, and he ultimately left behind the gadgets, as he called them, to pur sue that dream.

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it down. It didn’t help that the Learstar was los ing money, a fact that Lear never admitted pub licly. Nor did Lear’s general aviation compact avionics ever make much of a dent in a market dominated by Narco, Collins, Bendix and King.

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The wingtip fuel tanks were one distinctive char acteristic of early Learjets, like this Model 25. Later dispensedmodelswiththe tanks and put winglets in their place. The Swiss P-16 fighter prototype also sported wingtip tanks.

His rebuttal is not entirely convincing, for his five main points contain three clangers. First, Lear Jr. said the Lear 23 and the P-16 had “simi lar but not the same” airfoils. In fact, the first Learjet did utilize the P-16’s airfoil, although its leading edge was modified after a test pilot found that it had some squirrely handling and stall characteristics.“TheP-16wing sweep was zero, while the Learjet’s was 13 degrees,” said Lear Jr. Not true; both aircraft had identical 13-degree lead ing-edge sweeps and straight trailing edges.

So, Bill hired the P-16’s chief engineer, Hans Studer, to design a small business jet for the company Lear had already established in Swit zerland and called the Swiss American Aviation Corporation—SAAC. He named his new airplane the SAAC-23.

In Switzerland Lear became intrigued by a new Swiss fighter-bomber, the Flug-und Fahrzeugwerke Altenrhein AG (FFA) P-16, that was intended to replace the Swiss Air Force’s aging British de Havilland Vampire first-generation jets. The P-16, however, never made it past the prototype stage. Four were built, and two ended up at the bottom of Lake Constance when their test pilots ejected after experiencing systems failures. The Swiss press began referring to the P-16 as “the Swiss Submarine,” but Lear liked its thin, fast, multi-spar, low-aspect-ratio wing.

2007, Lear’s son William P. Lear Jr. was moved to rebut an article in Aviation International News that ran “complete with references to the wellworn tale of the Swiss fighter connection.” Lear Jr., a former Air Force and Air National Guard fighter pilot, had flown the P-16 to evaluate it at FFA’s request, and claims that he was the source of his father’s interest in the design.

He also said, “The P-16 had a cruciform tail and the Learjet a T tail.” True of the prototype and production airplanes, but the scale model of the first Lear 23 proposal, as designed by Gordon Israel, had a cruciform tail like the P-16’s. It was changed to a T tail when the airplane turned out to be faster than expected and needed a horizon tal stabilizer well out of the wing’s turbulent wake. (Lear famously called the revised design “the best-looking piece of tail I ever saw.”)

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here has been a long-running battle be tween those who claim the resulting Lear 23 was directly derived from the FFA P-16 and those who insist that the Learjet was an entirely new design with just a few fea tures inspired by the Swiss jet. As recently as

True to his all-or-nothing character, Lear took a major gamble with the Learjet 23. He didn’t build a prototype, a hand-built unit that could be

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Whatever the case, engineer Israel, responsi ble for much of the Learjet’s design, did draft an entirely new internal structure for the wing, though he retained the Swiss multiple-spar con cept. Both airplanes also included the distinctive wingtip fuel tanks.

One of Lear’s later projects was an attempt to create a better steam engine that would use a thermally efficient fluid called Learium. The endeavor failed, with a single steam-powered bus the only result. Lear also worked on a steam-powered racing car, which he planned to power with what he called a Vapordyne engine.

Israel became involved after Lear summarily snatched SAAC out of Switzerland, renamed it Learjet Inc. and moved it to Wichita, Kansas, in 1962. As his son Bill Jr. recalls, “We bailed out of Switzerland [because] labor was half the price, but it took four times as long to get anything done.” Swiss engineers and technicians turned out to be better suited to creating wristwatches than airplanes. Israel was eventually fired, and the Model 23 design was completed by former Cessna engineer Henry Waring, who had been responsible for the Cessna T-37 Air Force pri mary trainer known as the Tweet, as well as the handsome Cessna 310 light twin.

tested for flaws and modified as necessary, with the changes then carried to the production line. Instead, he built his very first airplane using pro duction tooling and jigs, and changing any of them would have been very expensive. (The wing’s leading edge was reprofiled, but that was a simple sheet metal modification.) “With this approach,” he said, “you’re either very right or veryThewrong.”firstLearjet made its initial flight on Oc tober 7, 1963. On June 4, 1964, the FAA pilot fly ing it during certification testing forgot to re tract the landing spoilers during a touch-and-go takeoff and the airplane ended up on its belly in a cornfield. There was little damage, but a fuel line broke and started a fire that reduced the air plane to cinders. “We just sold our first Learjet,” Bill said as he pocketed the insurance check. The FAA was embarrassed enough by the crash that it smoothed the path to certification as much as possible, and Lear had his jet approved that July 31, less than two months after the accident. Even more important, it received certification four

By mitigating the wingtip vortices created by the passage of the wing through the air, the winglets on this later Learjet model reduce drag that the wing creates as it generates lift.

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Bill Lear’s last airplane, the Lear Fan 2100, hadn’t flown by the time he died. Only three were built, and none were sold. They were man ufactured almost entirely under the direction of Moya Lear and were riddled with structural and powerplant problems.

Yet it could have been one of the most import ant airplanes of its time, for the Lear Fan was made entirely of composites—carbon-rein forced plastics. Hard lessons learned during the prototyping of the Lear Fan are today reflected in a wide variety of composite-crafted aircraft from fighters to airliners.

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months ahead of Lear’s biggest competition, the Aero Commander 1121 Jet Commander. The Lear 23 project cost Bill the equivalent of $112 million in today’s dollars. Never before had a sin gle individual conceived, driven, produced and financed an aviation project of such magnitude. (During the certification process, Lear got a ride in a Lincoln Continental that had been outfitted with a Muntz Autostereo four-track tape deck. Never one to miss an opportunity, he immedi ately became a Muntz distributor, and within a year Lear had invented the first eight-track ste reo deck, after being told it couldn’t be done.)

The Lear Fan was also a pusher, with its pro peller at the tail end of the fuselage. That config uration allows an airplane’s fuselage, and some of its wing, to fly through undisturbed air, thus decreasing drag and increasing airspeed, range and efficiency. The Lear Fan’s single prop was driven by two turboshaft engines, through a troublesome gearbox that sought to combine their power.

Soon after the Model 23 and a couple of fol low-on versions flew, Lear became bored and sold his company to the Gates Rubber Company. (The resulting Gates Learjet Corporation com pressed the original Lear Jet name into one word.) Lear moved on to other projects. None would ever achieve success in his hands.

Canadair inflated the already-rotund fuselage to mini-airliner size—the company called it a walk-around cabin and Lear referred to it as “Fat Albert”—and renamed the airplane the Chal lenger 600. Challengers are being built to this day, in three different sizes, as is a line of re gional airliners based on the stretched Chal lenger and called CRJs. Canadair sidelined Bill Lear in 1977 and he had no involvement with either line of airplanes.

Constructed with composites and powered by a complex pusher engine, the Lear Fan project could not overcome myriad technical difficulties.

His agreement with Gates forbade him from designing or building aircraft for five years, so Lear decided to solve the world’s air pollution problem by designing a steam-powered automo bile. However, Lear’s grasp of automotive tech nology was mired in the 1940s. He considered research to be a trip to Harrah’s Las Vegas vin tage-car museum and seemed to believe that all atmospheric contamination was caused by vehi cles. “I want to be the man who eradicated air pollution,” he said. He intended the car’s engine, a steam turbine, to be powered by a closed-cycle superheated liquid he called Learium. (Lear named virtually everything he invented after himself.) The liquid was supposed to be denser than water so it would hold more heat, but Lear finally was forced to use plain distilled water.

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The prototype flew on January 1, 1981, and two more aircraft followed before the program ended.

After Bill Lear died in 1978, his widow, Moya, oversaw his last airplane project, the Lear Fan.

He continued to call it Learium, though every body knew it was a joke; he privately referred to it asTheDelearium.steam-car project failed miserably, ap pearing very briefly in prototype form as a clunky and impractical steam-powered bus, but Lear shouldered the blame. He reportedly said that if he had only read a physics textbook, he would have known that it would never work.

The aging entrepreneur still had a couple of airplanes up his sleeve, though by the time the first one flew, it bore virtually none of his DNA. He called it the Learstar 600, repurposing the name he’d used for his modified Lodestar. It was to be a spacious twinjet with a fast, efficient, su percritical wing and newly developed turbofan engines but it never advanced beyond a very pre liminary paper concept limned by an outside consultant. By 1975, Lear had spent most of his fortune and couldn’t afford to do any more than dream about Learstar jets, but he managed to sell the dream to the Canadian company Cana dair, which figured that it was buying not so much an airplane as Lear’s name.

kemia in May 1978 at the age of 75. He may not have designed the business jet that bore his name, but he had certainly made an impact on aviation. Lear’s oft-stated mantra was, “Don’t nibble at a problem, take a big bite of it,” and he lived by those words. He did his best work well before people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk made rogue entrepreneurship part of the mainstream, but they would have understood.

By then Bill Lear was gone, having died of leu

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Stephan Wilkinson is Aviation History’s contributing editor. For further reading he recommends Stormy Genius: The Rags to Riches Life of Bill Lear by Richard Rashke; They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The Incredible Story of Bill Lear by Victor Boesen; and Fly Fast...Sin Boldly: Flying, Spying and Sur viving by William P. Lear Jr.

On March 28, 2022, Bombardier Aerospace, which had purchased the Learjet Cor poration in 1990, delivered the last Learjet, a model 75. “There’s no doubt that today is an emotional day for many of us as it marks the end of the production era of Learjet,” said Bombardier’s vice president for Learjet operations, Tonya Sud duth. Since the first Learjet 23 flew in 1963, more than 3,000 airplanes with the name Learjet had been produced; around 2,000 are still flying. The line had gone through many changes and upgrades over its nearly six decades. Winglets replaced the original wingtip fuel tanks, fuselages became stretched and engines received upgrades. With the introduction of the Learjet 45 in 1998, Bombardier essentially parted ways with the original jet and began produc ing a wholly new airplane—but kept the iconic name. Bombardier announced plans to introduce an all-composite Learjet 85 but cancelled the project in 2015, making the Model 75 the end of the line. We will see no more airplanes bearing the name Learjet, but Bill Lear’s vision will re main the symbol of luxury private air travel for many.

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The FAA had never certificated an all-compos ite aircraft, and some people involved with the Lear Fan project claim that the government’s de mands for increased structural strength were two and three times greater—and heavier—than necessary. Throughout the process, the Lear Fan’s weight grew and performance shrank. The Lear Fan never came close to its initial perfor mance predictions, the FAA ultimately refused to certify it and the Irish company formed to build it declared bankruptcy.

An early model Learjet leads three later models into the sunset. Before selling the company to Gates, Lear produced Models 23, 24 and 25. Gates Learjet started its line with the Model 35, before circling back with Models 28, 29 and 31. Bombardier produced Models 60, 45, 40 and 70/75.

THE LAST LEARJET

Employees of Bombardier Aerospace surround the final Learjet in March 2022 before it was delivered to its new owner, Northern Jet Management of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although the jet was far removed from Lear’s original Model 23, the concept owed much to his vision.

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Calbraith Perry Rodgers lifts off in the Vin Fiz from a racetrack at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn on September 17, 1911. He was one of three aviators vying to win a $50,000 prize by flying across the country in 30 days or less. In the end, no one qualified to win the prize money.

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Fowler, 27, was the first to start, departing from San Francisco on September 11, 1911. A na tive of San Francisco, Fowler had recently com pleted training at the Wright brothers’ school in Dayton and he flew a Wright biplane. “Fowler expects to cover not more than 3,200 miles, fol lowing the northern route of the Southern Pa cific Railway,” wrote the San Francisco Exam iner. This was the shortest route, but it crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains—a formidable obstacle. On the second day of his attempt, Fowler crashed near Alta, California. He was battered and bruised, and his airplane would

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Such a feat would smash all existing records for long-distance, multi-leg flights. Wilbur Wright, for one, was skeptical that it was even possible, feeling that the Wrights’ motor was not up for the task. “I think sixty days ought to be allowed for this reason,” he said. Aviator Glenn Curtiss was more optimistic, saying he didn’t have “the slightest doubt that it will be done.” Louis Blériot, who had become the first person to fly across the English Channel the previous year, was itching to give it a try. “If I had not pledged my word to my wife that I would not fly again, I would certainly compete for this prize and this honor,” he stated.

The list of pilots who said they’d vie for the prize was a who’s who of aviation pioneers. It included Henri Farman, Roland Garros, Harry At wood, Walter Brookins, Thomas Sopwith and John Moisant. In the end, three pilots, none of them as well-known, made the attempt. They were Calbraith Rodgers, Robert Fowler and James Ward. The obstacles they had to overcome included the lack of powerful, reliable engines; unstable, delicate aircraft easily tossed about by the elements; muddy, rut-filled fields that made takeoffs and landings dangerous, and the lack of naviga

he still-young aviation world began buzzing following an announcement newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst made on October 10, 1910. The media mogul pledged $50,000 to the first pilot to fly across the United States in 30 days or less, in either direction, by October 10, 1911. Hearst said he intended the prize to “encourage the useful development of the aeroplane,” but if he gained publicity for his newspapers, so much the better.

Rodgers received sponsorship from the Armour meat-packing company, which had just introduced a new soft drink called Vin Fiz. The company provided a Wright EX airplane and logistical support (including a train) and paid Rodgers by the mile. After the flight, Armour produced this promotional poster touting Rodgers’ epic and historic journey.

tional instruments. “The man who makes it will be exceptional, physically and intellectually,” Wilbur Wright said. “He will need every atom of courage in his make-up.”

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albraith Perry Rodgers began his attempt four days after Ward, with the goal of reaching Pasadena, outside Los Angeles. At 32, he was the oldest of the three contenders. Born in Pittsburgh to an affluent family in 1879, Rodgers contracted scarlet fever at the age of six and suffered significant hearing loss. This ruled out a career in the U.S. Navy, a family tradition.

Rodgers later moved to New York and enjoyed racing cars, motorcycles and yachts. He married Mabel Avis Graves in 1906, and the couple later settled in Havre de Grace, Maryland.

In June 1911, Rodgers visited a cousin in Ohio. Lieutenant John Rodgers was one of the first Naval aviators and was stationed at the Wrights’ flying school in Dayton. Cal Rodgers immedi ately became smitten with flying and signed up for lessons. He made his first solo flight a week later, after only 90 minutes of instruction, bought a Wright Model B and quickly earned aviator’s license number 49.

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need a major rebuild before he could resume his journey eastward.

Ward was the next to start. Born in Denmark in 1886 and raised in Minnesota as Jens Wilson, Ward had changed his name after he moved to Chicago and began racking up speeding tickets while working as a chauffeur. After he graduated from cars to airplanes, he began flying a Curtiss biplane; eventually he became an exhibition pilot for Glenn Curtiss. The Aero Club of Amer ica issued him flying license number 52.

about 200 pounds, so when he began exhibition flights he made headlines as the world’s largest aviator. He was also a man of few words. He radi ated calm and confidence and usually had a cigar clenched between his teeth. At the Chicago In ternational Aviation Meet in August 1911 Rodg ers made a name for himself, winning a total of $11,285, $6,875 of it for logging the greatest amount of flying time (27 hours) during the nine-day meet. A few days later, Rodgers took his mother, Maria Rodgers Sweitzer, up in his Model B, most likely the first time a pilot flew his mother as a passenger. “If I were young I’d buy myself an aeroplane and sail thru the air,” Sweitzer said after landing.

Ward took off from New York’s Governors Is land on September 13. He was flying a Curtiss biplane powered by a 50-hp engine. “High gusty winds brought him to the grass twice in the course of the day,” reported the New York Sun. “But he wasn’t hurt.”

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Rodgers was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed

Many pioneering aviators expressed interest in Hearst’s contest, but only three attempted it. Top left: Californian Robert Fowler (seated at right) decided to try flying from west to east. Top right: Standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and with a cigar usually clamped between his teeth, Rodgers had learned to fly only a few months before his cross-country flight. Above: James Ward was born in Denmark but raised in Minnesota. He had worked as a chauffeur before switching to airplanes.

Rodgers persuaded Armour & Company to sponsor his transcontinental attempt. The Chi cago-based meat-packing concern had recently branched out by introducing a new soft drink called Vin Fiz, a grape soda. The company agreed to pay Rodgers $5 for every mile he flew east of the Mississippi and $4 for every mile west of the river, where the population was less. Armour provided Rodgers with a Wright EX (for experi

Four days after Rodgers’ crash, on September 22, an engine failure forced Ward to make a hard landing in Addison, New York. Later that day, he announced he’d had enough. “When my engine failed and I was forced to [descend] 1,000 feet to earth here today it was the last straw needed to break the camel’s back,” he said. “I am through.” In the meantime, Fowler found himself stuck in Colfax, California, unable to make it over the Si erra

Rodgers took off from the Sheepshead Bay racetrack in Brooklyn, New York, at 4:24 p.m. on September 17. He would have departed earlier,

but the crowd of 2,000 pressed too closely—a scene that would be repeated in town after town. “It was only after the aviator warned the crowd that somebody would get killed if a clear path wasn’t made for the biplane that the crowd backed away,” reported the New York Sun. Rod gers flew 104 miles in 105 minutes, ending the day in Middletown, New York.

The Flyer also carried an automobile so the crew could reach Rodgers when he landed—or crashed—away from the tracks. His mother and wife, who reportedly did not get along, were aboard the train, along with a crew of mechanics (including Charles Taylor, who used to work for the Wrights), a publicity manager and Armour representatives, along with a rotating crew of newspaper reporters.

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Top: Crashes became a regular occurence for Rodgers. He listed eight in his logbook, but that didn’t count the many times he had to make forced landings along the way. Above: Rodgers and the Vin Fiz were both battered by the time they reached the West Coast. The only original parts of the airplane that remained from the time of takeoff were a rudder and an oil-drip pan.

The first crash happened on Rodgers’ second day of travel. “Owing to the dense crowd which packed about his machine and refused to move back, Rodgers was compelled to start in a direc tion which sent him crashing into a tall tree,” reported the Buffalo Enquirer. “He tried to veer his course but was menaced by telegraph wires and rather than chance electrocution he risked a crash into the trunk of a tree.” Rodgers was knocked unconscious and received a gash on his right temple. The Vin Fiz broke a propeller and had large sections of canvas shredded. “I intend to resume flight just as soon as I can,” Rodgers said. “That cut in my head is painful, but I don’t believe it will prove serious.”

RodgersNevada.and the patched-up Vin Fiz began that day in Hancock, New York. He hoped to reach Binghamton but followed the wrong rail road tracks. He was shocked when he spotted coal mines below him. “I had studied the route enough to know that coal mines did not belong in Binghamton,” he said. He landed and asked the growing crowd if he was in Binghamton. He wasn’t; he was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, off by one state and 60 miles. But the Vin Fiz, the first airplane to visit Scranton, caused a sensation. People signed their names on the fabric and climbed all over the machine. “They liked to work the levers, sit upon the seat, warp the planes and finger the engine,” said Rodgers. “I lost my temper when a man came up with a chisel to punch his monogram on an upright.”

Rodgers crashed again two days later when he collided with a barbed-wire fence on takeoff from a field outside Jamestown, New York. “Now the repairs I need will delay me three days and the man whose fence I hit needs a new one,” he noted.

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mental) biplane, a modified Model B that was a little smaller and faster than the original. Rodg ers called it the Vin Fiz and had the underside of the lower wing emblazoned with the soft drink’s logo. In addition, Armour provided a three-train railroad caravan to follow Rodgers across the country. The train cars were painted white so Rodgers could spot them from the air, as he planned to use railroad tracks for his navigation system. The “hangar” car contained Rodgers’ Model B and $4,000 worth of spare parts, enough to rebuild the Model EX three times.

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Departing from San Francisco meant that Fowler would have to face a formidable obstacle: the Sierra Nevada mountains. Here his airplane forms the nucleus of an impromptu picnic as Fowler readies himself to get over the peaks that lie to the east. When the mountains proved impassable, Fowler shifted his starting point to Los Angeles. Below: Rodgers takes to the sky someplace in the Midwest. By the time Hearst’s 30-day deadline had passed, Rodgers had completed less than half the journey.

When he reached Marshall, Missouri, on Oc tober 10, Rodgers had flown 1,398 miles. This broke the record of 1,256 miles set by Harry At wood on a recent St. Louis-to-New York trek. That was the good news. The bad news was that October 10 was the cutoff for the Hearst prize and Rodgers hadn’t even reached his halfway point. Although he no longer had a shot at Hearst’s money, Rodgers remained determined to finish the journey. With the deadline re moved, he decided to detour to the south, then fly across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona into California. This route added several hundred miles, but it avoided high mountains.

n October 17, Rodgers ran out of fuel near Pottsboro, Texas, and landed in a field. “He was in a cotton patch and two wide-eyed country lasses stood near the ma chine gazing in wonder,” reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The young ladies located a couple cans of gas so Rodgers could refuel. “Then the aviator mounted to his seat and the two girls cranked the propellors as gracefully as any mechanician ever could.” The next day he was over Dallas, where a crowd of 4,000 “were beyond the control of the mounted police and patrolman,” reported the paper. “They swarmed over the field, cheering, throwing hats and caps into the air, and seriously interfering with the aviator, whose face could be seen as he peered

down and slowly circled the field in spirals.”

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On October 1, Rodgers reached Huntington, Indiana, after a nerve-wracking flight among thunderstorms. Stuck on the ground by the winds the next day, Rodgers went for a joyride in the caravan’s automobile and continued his streak of bad luck when he hit a ditch and shat tered the brake shaft. “That added to the avia tor’s gloom, for next to flying, he likes nothing better than buzzing around in his auto,” re ported the Huntington Herald

As this was happening, Fowler was back in Los Angeles, having given up his attempt to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains. He decided he would follow the same southerly route as Rodgers, but in reverse. That meant the two aviators might cross paths.

On October 19, aviator Eugene Ely—the first man to take off from and land on a ship—died in a crash at an air meet. The news shook Rodgers and the next day he made a careful inspection of the Vin Fiz and discovered that the wires for the elevator and rudder were seriously worn, to the point that they might have failed before he reached his goal of San Antonio, 188 miles away. He made the necessary repairs, but then almost crashed when his engine failed at 3,500 feet. He was able to glide— “volplane,” as it was called back then— for two miles, noting in his log that he “made a perfect landing in the only pasture within forty miles.”

He crashed again on October 25 when taking off from Spofford, Texas. According to his log,

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Rodgers knew what to do. He headed in one direction, and the crowd followed. Then he quickly changed course, “sailing over the heads at a height of probably seventy-five feet and then coming to earth half a block away.”

Engine repaired, Rodgers hoped to finish his journey the next day, but it was not to be. Just past Banning, as Rodgers neared the peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, the engine began to sputter, forcing Rodgers to land. He discovered that his fuel tank was leaking and he had nearly run out of Novemberfuel.5 found Rodgers only 80 miles from Pasadena, his designated end point. But the Vin Fiz was in bad shape, especially the en gine, and there was no guarantee it would make the last leg. Rodgers had to land in Pomona for engine repairs but was soon back in the air for the final 30 miles of his flight. In Pasadena, a crowd of 20,000 was waiting for him. As the Vin Fiz touched down, “the crowd was transformed into a maelstrom of aviation-mad people,” re ported the Examiner . “Fully 10,000 people rushed madly for the machine. Men stumbled and went down and were carelessly trodden on as the wave of humanity swept on.”

Top left: Rodgers savors his triumph and a cigar as the Vin Fiz meets the Pacific Ocean on December 10, 1911. Top right: The previous month in Pasadena, 20,000 people turned out to greet Rodgers at the official last stop of his journey. Above: Rodgers did not have long to enjoy his accomplishment. On April 3, 1912, a seagull became entangled in his airplane’s control surfaces and Rodgers plunged to his death in the ocean.

Rodgers reached town on November 1. The

Tucson Citizen reported, “Hardly had he brought his aeroplane to a stop when his brother-aviator, R. G. Fowler, dashed up in an automobile, sprang out, and grasped his hand with hearty congratu lations. ‘Well done, old man; it was a beautiful flight,’ he said.”

Two days later Rodgers crossed the border into California, but his troubles were far from over. Just past Imperial Junction (now Niland), a cylinder blew, wrecking the motor. “Quickly shutting off his gas, the aviator began to vol plane, and glided back over the four miles to Im perial Junction, where he made a successful landing near the Southern Pacific station at 11 o’clock,” reported the San Francisco Examiner Other newspapers wrote that metallic frag ments from the blown engine “passed perilously close to Rodgers’ head.”

He crashed the repaired plane again three days later, when he hit a fence as he took off from Sanderson, Texas. He smashed the skids but was soon back in the air. He flew 231 miles that day and landed in Sierra Blanca, Texas—his longest one-day flight. According to newspaper reports, Rodgers attended the bullfights in nearby Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, and “attracted greatFowlerattention.”wasgetting closer. On October 30, he was approaching the University of Arizona in Tucson when a wind gust blew his biplane into grandstands where hundreds of spectators were waiting. “For a time there was panic, but it was soon quelled when the machine was seen to stop, tangled up in the barb wire fence that surrounds the stands,” according to newspaper reports. Nobody was injured, but Fowler had destroyed the skids of his airplane. He remained in Tucson, waiting for repairs and for the arrival of Rodgers.

Rodgers had flown 4,231 miles in 49 days, sur viving eight crashes (according to his log) and several near crashes after he was forced to glide

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“the right propeller struck a little mound of earth the plane swerved, there was a crash and both propellers were splintered. The skids col lapsed and the machine swung due north, the left warping wing hitting the ground and crum pling as though it were made of pasteboard.”

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On the other side of the country, Fowler landed in Moncrief Park in Jacksonville, Florida, at 4:45 p.m. on February 12, 1912. He had become the second man to fly across the country and the first to do it west to east. A year later Fowler ac complished another first by flying nonstop across the Isthmus of Panama—the world’s first nonstop transcontinental flight.

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The first person to fly across the United States was buried in Pittsburgh. His airplane, the much-battered Vin Fiz , is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

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seagulls. Observers saw him fly through the birds and then go into a 45-degree dive. “Rodgers was seen to pull on his lever control and give a star tled look backward at his machinery, which evi dently had not responded to his will,” reported the Los Angeles Times. One of the seagulls had become wedged between the rudder and tail, making it impossible to control the airplane. “The next instant the horrified spectators saw the biplane continue to drop like a plummet. Straight into the first line of breakers it darted, plunged its nose into the sand, wavered for a sec ond, and then turned over, pinioning Rodgers in the mass of broken wires and framework.” The first doctor to arrive at the crash site stated that the pilot had been killed instantly.

Steve Wartenberg is a freelance writer based in Columbus, Ohio. A former newspaper reporter, Wartenberg has written several books. For fur ther reading he recommends Cal Rodgers and the Vin Fiz: The First Transcontinental Flight by Eileen Lebow and Higher, Steeper, Faster: The Daredevils Who Conquered the Skies by Lawrence Goldstone.

AUTUMN 2022 43

Cal Rodgers did not have long to savor his tri umph. He started performing exhibition flights from Long Beach in his Model B and he was in the air on April 3 when he flew into a flock of

Orr raced over to untangle the pilot from the wreckage. Rodgers had suffered a concussion, internal injuries and a broken ankle. “Oh, I’ll fin ish that flight, all right,” he said the next night from his bed as he smoked a cigar.

He made good on that pledge on December 10. Starting near the field where he’d crashed a month earlier, Rodgers took off in the repaired Vin Fiz after a brief delay due to high wind and headed toward Long Beach. “A crowd estimated at 60,000 persons saw the landing, and as the wheels of Rodgers’ machine touched the sands an enthusiastic throng surged on the aviator and the impact of the rush pushed the machine into the waves,” reported the Stockton Evening Mail Rodgers, still recovering from his injuries, “limped away on crutches which he had carried in the frame [of the Vin Fiz],” reported the Los Angeles Record.

to earth after his engine quit or ran out of fuel. He averaged 51.59 miles per hour. By the time he reached Pasadena, all that was left of the original Vin Fiz were the rudder and oil-drip plan. And the battered pilot. “No, I don’t feel tired.… It’s easy.… But I don’t believe it can be done in thirty days,” Rodgers said, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper noted that the pilot, sipping a glass of milk, was a man of few words and that his responses “to the many questions put to him were almost monosyllabic.”

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Above: Fowler eventually completed his west-toeast journey across the continent and later became the first pilot to complete a togetherLeft:Panamawhentranscontinentalnonstopflightheflewacrossinthisseaplane.Rodgers’pieced-

Vin Fiz now belongs to the collections of the Smithsonian.

“OH, ASMOKEDBEDFROMNIGHTTHEHEALLFLIGHT,THATFINISHI’LLRIGHT,”SAIDNEXTHISASHECIGAR.

Although he had reached his destination, Rod gers remained determined to fly all the way to the Pacific at Long Beach. “I must go to the surf, and I will do this just as soon as I can get my motor fixed,” he said. He was finally ready on November 12. About 75,000 people gathered in Long Beach, awaiting his arrival. Just past Compton, the Vin Fiz ’s engine began to sputter. The Los Angeles Times reported that James Orr, a Compton ranch owner, heard the engine quit. “Then he saw Rodgers lean forward and tug frantically at a lever. The engine seemed to stop dead, the forward end of the planes tilted and an instant later the whole plunged to the ground.”

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In July 1944, a mostly Canadian crew set out from England on a night bombing mission aboard Lancaster L7576 of Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Awaiting them was a nocturnal gantlet of German radar, anti-aircraft artillery and specialized night fighters. The fate of some of the crew remained a mystery for decades. This Lancaster is Just Jane, from the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre in East Kirby, England.

Soon afterward, Doe shipped out to Britain for first posting to the Ad vanced Flying Unit, Royal Air Force Wigtown, in the southwest of Scot land. He arrived at the start of 1944. It was cold and wet, but Doe didn’t care. He was leading the life he had dreamed about for years. At the front of his diary Doe penned a brief poem:

arry Doe started keeping a diary in January 1944. It was going to be a monumental year and the 21-year-old Cana dian wanted a record for posterity.

If I should die and you bury me And send my things across the sea, One favor, ere you let me be Please burn this ruddy diary.

D

H

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oe spent the first fortnight of 1944 fly ing, sleeping and drinking. It was a good life, but one that didn’t leave much time to commit his innermost thoughts to his diary. Rather than record his emotions, Doe simply noted his activities. On January 10 he took the train south to his new station, RAF Chipping Warden, which was in Oxfordshire, 75 miles northwest of London. Shortly afterward, at a mess dinner, Doe hit it off with a fellow Cana dian named Harold Sherman Peabody, or Al, as heInpreferred.fact,Peabody, whom Doe described in his diary as a “good type,” had been born in 1920 not in Canada but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father worked for the Canada Life in surance company. He was a baby when the fam ily relocated to Quebec. At Bishop’s University in Quebec, the handsome Peabody had been a

Harry’s elder brother, Robert, had enlisted in the navy, but there was only one branch of service for Harry—the Royal Canadian Air Force. His father had been a pilot in the First World War, and Doe had grown up obsessed with aircraft. As an adolescent, he had been a talented model-maker and won several compe titions with his creations. He joined the air force in 1941 at the age of 18 as a mechanic and the following year he was sent to Edmonton, Alberta, for aircrew training. After completing the technical training school, Doe started air observer’s school and in August 1943 he was commissioned as pilot observer and awarded his navigation wings.

Left to right: Lew Fiddick, Harry Doe and Harold S. “Al” Peabody relax between missions at No.622 Squadron’s base, RAF Mildenhall, in June 1944. Doe and Peabody had about a month left to live. Fiddick would find himself behind enemy lines in occupied France, spending weeks with French guerrillas and with British Special Air Services (SAS) soldiers.

the academic sense, he nonetheless was sharp and intelligent, the sort of man on whom one could rely. Fiddick, Peabody and Doe shared a hut when they moved into their new base at RAF Edgehill in mid-February.

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By the beginning of February they had a bomb-aimer, Flying Officer Lew Fiddick. Born in British Columbia, Fiddick was an outdoors man who had been working as a logger in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, when war was de clared. Fiddick was 27 and had a quiet maturity that impressed Peabody. Not an educated man in

They were flying regularly by this point and Doe was mastering the skills particular to his job as navigator. He attended lectures about as tronavigation, practiced on dead-reckoning in struments and, most difficult of all, became fa miliar with Gee, a radio navigation system developed in the late 1930s that triangulated position based on the time delay between two separateFortunatelytransmitters.forDoe there was plenty of light relief to be had at RAF Edgehill. “Went to Po licemen’s Dance in Banbury with Al and Lew,” he wrote in his diary on February 23. “Quite drunk.” The next day he flew despite having a “splitting headache.”

It ended up being a raucous night. By the end, the officers were climbing the rafters, yelling and hollering in drunken ecstasy. “Very stiff,” Doe noted in his diary the next day.

star athlete on the golf and hockey teams before he quit his studies to enroll in the Commonwealth’s flight-training program in Windsor Mills, Quebec. Sport helped Peabody bond with Doe as the two young men drank their beer in the mess. Doe had been a talented foot baller and boxer at high school, where he had won the lightweight title in the Greater Victoria Schoolboy Boxing Competition.

When his training period at RAF Edgehill ended on March 25, Doe spent an extended leave in London, taking in shows and taking out girls. His leave ended the second week of April but it wasn’t until the end of May that he was posted to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Feltwell in Norfolk in the east of England. This

Clockwise from left: Harry Doe started keeping a diary in January 1944, but he wanted it destroyed if he died during the war; (left to right) Bob Doe, brother Harry Doe and Al Peabody enjoy time off in London in July 1944; Harry sketched this portrait of an unknown fellow serviceman; as a RAF navigator, Harry would have worn wings like these.

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The following weeks were mundane. Most of the time was spent in the classroom, but gradu ally a crew began to form. “Got a gunner—Buck ley,” wrote Doe in his diary on January 20. Ser geant Percy Buckley was a streetwise 18-year-old from London, a likeable fellow whom Doe and Peabody invited to be their rear gunner.

Center: A Me-110G-4Messerschmittof Nachtjagdgeschwader 6 is similar to that piloted by Leutnant Walter Swoboda on the night of July 28-29, 1944, when he scored his first and only aerial victory. Pilots called the night fighter’s radar antennas “deer antlers.”

was the last step before he became op erational. That day arrived on an aus picious date: June 6. “INVASION,” wrote Doe in capital letters in his diary, adding: “Posted to 622 SQN. Bit of a No.piss-up.”622Squadron had been formed the previous year and was based at RAF Mildenhall, also on the eastern side of England. It had first flown Stirling Mk III bombers but since December the crews had been reequipped with Lancaster Mk IIIs and operated as part of No. 3 Group in RAF Bomber Command’s main force.

navy. The two Doe brothers spent the time in London in the company of some delightful Red CrossDoe’sgirls.leave ended on July 10 and for the next week he was on standby. On July 17 he was re called from a daylight raid shortly before takeoff for a reason that Doe didn’t explain in his diary. The next day the squadron bombed Caen in a daylight raid. On July 20 the target was the town of Homberg, the first time Doe had flown a mission over Germany. On July 23 he flew a night raid on Kiel and the following evening the target was Stuttgart in southwest Germany.

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Like the rest of the crew, Wishart was unfa miliar with the aircraft they would fly that night. The crews were not assigned to specific aircraft; instead, they flew the airplanes that were avail able at the time. None of them had flown in Lan caster L7576 before, but it had a legendary status within the squadron. Having survived 98 mis sions, it was considered a lucky “crate.” At 10:00 on the evening of July 28 Lancaster L7576 lifted off with payload of five 1,000-pound bombs and two 500-pounders, all of which were to be dropped over Stuttgart’s railway yards.

No. 619 Squadron, RAF.

The relief for Doe on returning safely to base after that mission was particularly acute be cause the next morning, July 1, he embarked on an extended leave, the first five days of which dovetailed with his brother’s furlough from the

The mission for July 27 was scrubbed, so Doe and the rest of the crew went to a show instead. By now they were connected by a strong bond. Doe, Peabody and Fiddick had become friends as well as comrades, and Percy Buckley was also a valued member of the crew. Another Briton in the crew, 29-year-old Arthur Payton, was a com petent wireless operator and the only married man among them. He had wed in the summer of 1939, shortly before he resigned from his job as a steelworker to volunteer for the RAF. The upper gunner was 21-year-old Richard Proulx from Ontario. Like Payton, he had flown several mis sions with Peabody. The flight engineer was Ser geant David Cosgrove.

On July 28, Cosgrove was sick, so Lieutenant George Wishart took his place for a mission to Stuttgart that night. He was an experienced man to have as a late substitute. Born in London to Scottish parents, Wishart had joined the RAF at the age of 21 in 1935 and had been commissioned in May 1943.

Above: Manning the upper machine guns on Lancaster L7576 that night was 21-year-old Richard Proulx.

Top: Doe and bomberaboardcrewmembershisflewaLancasterlikethisone of

There are approximately 500 miles between RAF Mildenhall and Stuttgart, a route that took the 500 RAF aircraft south over eastern France. Sixty-two of the aircraft failed to return. Lan caster L7576 was one of them.

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Doe flew his first combat missions on June 23, a daylight attack on a V-2 rocket site near St.Omer in northern France. His third mission took place on June 30 when the RAF launched a daylight raid on German positions in Villers-Bo cage in Normandy. The town, 20 miles inland from the invasion beaches, had been the scene of fierce fighting since the British launched Oper ation Epsom on June 26 to continue the offen sive into France. Doe’s Lancaster was one of nearly 250 RAF bombers that flattened Vil lers-Bocage; it didn’t lead to a decisive British victory but it helped inflict damage on the Ger mans from which they never recovered.

t approximately 1:25 on the morning of July 29, Walter Swoboda picked up his prey on the radar of his Messerschmitt

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110G-4, the latest model of the twin-engine fighter-bomber. The Messer schmitt was a feared night fighter, equipped with Lichtenstein radar that enabled it to latch onto enemy aircraft in the darkness. But the 22-yearold Swoboda was a relatively inexperienced pilot with no victories. The first burst of cannon fire he shot at his target went wide of its mark. Sur prise was no longer on the German’s side. The Canadian pilot put his air craft into a “corkscrew,” flipping the bomber onto its side and diving for a few hundred feet before ascending. Swoboda had been taught about this defensive maneuver and pumped fire into the Lancaster as it came slowly out of its dive. “Almost immediately as we levelled off we were hit,” said Lew Fiddick. “I still remember the bullets hitting the aeroplane—just a steady stream.”

The Maquis were the guerrillas of the French Resistance and Fiddick remained with them in their forest hideout for nearly two weeks. Then, on August 15, the Maquis handed him over to Captain Henry Druce, the officer in charge of 13 British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, an elite regiment that had been waging a guerrilla cam paign against the Germans in Occupied France since early June. Druce’s section was the advance

The villagers were aware that an aircraft had come down. One, 17-year-old Pierre Vinot, the son of a forest ranger, had arrived at the crash site on the morning of July 29. The Germans had beaten him to it, however, and were sifting through the wreckage. “I saw two dead—they were all in one piece—and another one who was dismembered,” Vinot remembered. “Dogs were eating this third man.” The Germans allowed the locals to remove the dead and bury them in the churchyard of Petitmont. The Germans then began scouring the countryside for the remain ing crew

nority of inhabitants had German ties and was loyal to the Ultimately,Fatherland.hungergot the better of Fiddick and he hobbled into Cirey-sur-Vezouze. “I finally knocked at a house and the people took me in and fed me,” he said.

The fire from the Me-110 ripped through the Lancaster, killing Percy Buckley in the rear turret, Richard Proulx in the upper turret and wireless operator Arthur Payton. Bullets also shot away the tail control, crippling the aircraft. Fiddick squeezed out of the forward turret and met engineer George Wishart, who had come down from above, in the nose section. Both knew the aircraft was doomed. Wishart yanked the release handle of the escape hatch and plunged through the hole into the darkness. Fiddick was about to follow when he thought of Peabody and Doe in the cockpit. They were his buddies. He had to see if he could help. He crawled toward the cockpit, but the Lancaster was in its death throes. He felt a series of violent shudders and then a massive jolt hurled Fiddick backwards and through the escape hatch. “The next thing I knew I was falling through the air,” he remembered.Fiddickcrashed through saplings as he fell to earth beneath his para chute. His leg hurt and his senses were still scrambled but he had the wherewithal to bury his parachute and Mae West. He suspected he had come down in northeastern France but did not know where. He decided to limp south. Not long after daylight on July 29 he spotted the village of Cirey-sur-Vezouze. For two days he hid in the undergrowth, observing the villagers and wondering whether it would be safe to approach them. Like all aircrews, he had been briefed that this rugged and thickly forested re gion had a particular history. Germany and France had fought over it for 75 years and it had changed hands on several occasions; as a result a mi

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Above: Cirey-sur-Vezouze was the French village where Lew Fiddick found assistance after being shot down. Right: This map shows the route taken by L7576 on its 97th mission, a few days before its final flight. The target both times was Stuttgart, so this is the same course the Lancaster would have followed on its 99th and last assignment.

Fiddickmembers.waspassed into the care of Leonard Barassi, a 44-year-old Italian who had lived in the region for years and was loosely involved with the resistance effort. He sheltered the Ca nadian for a few days until “on the afternoon of August 4 a member of the Maquis came and took me to the Maquis camp.”

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weeks behind enemy lines. “Having grown up on Vancouver Island, the forest was an environ ment in which I felt comfortable,” he told me. “I took to the SAS type of warfare quite quickly and it was interesting work.”

An MRES team visited the crash site in 1947 but could not determine what had happened to the two missing airmen. They wrote in their re port that Doe and Peabody “either drifted over the then German border during their parachute descent and were apprehended there, or were still in the aircraft when it exploded and were blown to pieces.”

Fiddick provided the SAS with crucial skills they didn’t possess. During one of their frequent nighttime resupplies by the RAF, the SAS took Fiddick to the selected drop zone. “He was able to tell from the sound of the engine whether an aircraft belonged to the enemy or the Allies,” re membered SAS Captain John Hislop. “This was a help, as several of the planes to pass over the D.Z. had been German ones. He identified this one as British, and when it was directly overhead we gave the signal. It was answered correctly from the plane, which then wheeled round for theWhenrun-in.”Fiddick returned to England in October 1944 he told the RAF that, as far as he was aware, only he and Wishart had bailed out of the Lan caster. (Wishart had been badly injured on land ing and was found by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war as a POW and remained in the RAF post-war.) However, Fiddick did relay to the RAF’s Missing Research and Enquiry Service (MRES) what he had been told by the Maquis— that two airmen had been spotted close to where the Lancaster came down. But that was where the trail of Doe and Peabody went cold.

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But if the two men had been apprehended by

n December 2003 I traveled to Vancouver Is land to meet Lew Fiddick and Henry Druce for a book I was writing about the SAS. Fiddick had been made an honorary member of Druce’s regiment for his exploits during Operation Loy ton. He had proven to be a born guerrilla fighter, one of Druce’s most reliable men during the

Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi concentration camp built on French soil, probably figured in the deaths of Harry Doe and Al Peabody. The grounds may appear bucolic today, but the crematorium hints at the horrors that took place here during the war.

party for a larger operation codenamed Loyton, with the mission of harrying the Nazis in con junction with the local Maquis as the Germans withdrew east ahead of the advancing U.S. Third Army. “A Canadian pilot called Fiddick joined us,” Druce wrote in his operational log. “He had been shot down and had injured his leg, which made walking difficult.” For his part, Fiddick was relieved to be “finally among people I could understand!”

Barkworth also ascertained that three airmen had been executed at Natzweiler, one of whom was Sergeant Fredric Habgood, a British mem ber of a Lancaster that had been shot down on the same night as L7576. Habgood was hanged on July 31 and his corpse incinerated in the camp’s oven. It had not been possible to identity the other two airmen who had been killed at Natzweiler but a Nazi guard identified Peabody as one from a photograph. In his report on the deaths of the two airmen, who were “wearing combination overalls of a lighter shade than battledress khaki, fitted with zip fasteners on front,” Barkworth said it was “possible” they

The shootdown of Lancaster L7576 was Leutnant Walter Swoboda’s first victory. It was also his last. Sometime in July 1944 Swoboda, an Austrian, transferred from the 2nd to the 6th Staffel of Nachtjagdgeschwader 6. On the night December 17-18, 1944, his Me110G-4 went missing, apparently after being hit by anti-aircraft fire from the U.S. Army 204th Field Artillery near Felsberg. The remains of Swoboda and his crewmen, Unteroffiziere Ernst Meier and Franz Dinger, were never found. —Jon Guttman

The students’ diligence paid off. Among the piles of documents they sifted through were files from the British army’s War Crime Investigations Team. The team had been particularly active in northeastern France be cause 29 SAS soldiers of Operation Loyton had, like Doe and Peabody, vanished there during the war. Major Eric Barkworth, a tenacious and astute detective who had tracked down dozens of Nazis in the months after the war, had led the SAS investigation. He determined that the cap tured SAS soldiers had all been executed over the course of several weeks, some individually but most often in small groups. At some point before being murdered, most of the SAS prisoners had passed through a prisoner transit camp called Schirmeck, three miles from Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi death camp in France.

years later a memorial was un veiled near the site of the Lancaster’s crash. Mil itary and diplomatic dignitaries from France and Great Britain attended, as did relatives of the crew who traveled from their homes in Ire land, California, Quebec and British Columbia. Among them was Rick Doe, there to remember his uncle Harry, who in jest had written three quarters of a century earlier that in the event of his death his “ruddy diary” should be burned. Thankfully it wasn’t, and today it stands as a tes tament to a brave young man whose luck ran out on the 99th flight of Lancaster 7576.

Gavin Mortimer is a British historian who has written extensively about World War II special forces. His latest book is David Stirling: the Pho ney Major, which was published in the U.S. in August 2022.

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Left: A memorial to the crew of Lancaster L7576 was dedicated in France in 2019. Attending the ceremony were (standing left to right) Robert Peck, Jon Peck, Rick Doe and Jon Peck Jr. Richard Coplen sits in front. His great-uncle was Percy Buckley, the tail gunner. The Pecks launched the Peabody Project in 2016 to get to the bottom of what happened to Al Peabody, their mother’s second cousin. Rick Doe is Harry Doe’s nephew.

Canadian brothers Jon and Robert Peck provided the impetus for the investigation of Lancaster L7576. Their late mother had been Al Peabody’s second cousin and in 2016 they launched the Peabody Project to try and discover what happened to Al and his buddy Harry Doe. They enlisted the help of Bishop’s University, where Al Peabody had made such an impres sion 75 years earlier. Three undergrad students there threw themselves into the search for answers. Rick Doe, Harry’s nephew, passed over to the students what he had in his possession, including Harry’s diary from 1944 and his flight log.

were from L7576. It is now almost certain that Peabody and Doe were indeed the mystery air men, since there were no other unaccounted Allied aircrew who had bailed out at that time in theSeventy-fiveregion.

SWOBODA?TOHAPPENEDWHATWALTER

the Germans, why had they disappeared off the face of the earth? The mys tery remained unsolved when Fiddick died in 2016 in his 100th year; but the puzzle was already in the process of being pieced together.

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Jack Fellows’ illustration, “One Down, Three to Go,” depicts Lieutenant Royce Williams’ encounter with Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15s on November 18, 1952, an action that stretched the limits of the Korean War. For years, the United States kept the encounter secret. The Soviet-flown MiGs lack national markings, reflecting what Williams stated in his after-action report.

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riving winds blew blinding snow across the deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Oriskany on November 18, 1952. In side the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther, Lt. Royce Williams watched the blizzard while waiting for the signal to take off from the Essex -class carrier as it plowed through the Sea of Japan. Snow was not uncommon at that time of year along the upper coast of North Korea, not far from the Soviet Union’s easternmost seaport of Vladivostok.

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Williams earned the Silver Star for his bravery that day, but some believe that wasn’t enough. A bipartisan effort in Congress is now trying to up grade the award to the Medal of Honor. “If I get a say in the matter, I would recommend an up

Above: A Grumman F9F-2 Panther of fighter squadron VF-112 lowers its folding wings in preparation for takeoff from the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea. Below: Williams flew a later model of the jet, the F9F-5. The Panther was the airplane the Navy used the most in the Korean War, and it was a Panther pilot who scored the Navy’s first aerial victory in the conflict.

Williams was preparing to fly a combat air patrol to cover the naval task force to which the carrier belonged. This mission turned out to be differ ent than he expected, though. Instead of flying a routine patrol, Williams made history by tangling with seven Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15s and, according to his account, downing four of them. However, because of military secrecy and U.S. concerns over broadening the Korean conflict, the details of Williams’ combat success remained secret for four decades and the veteran Navy pilot was not allowed to talk about what he had done.

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“When I finally told my wife, Camilla said, ‘Oh, Royce!’” Williams, 97 and a veteran of three wars, recalled recently. “She was very surprised.”

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The Panther had one major drawback, how ever: its speed. Maxing out at around 600 miles per hour, the F9F-5 was noticeably slower than one of its main opponents, the MiG-15. The So viet-made jet was about 100 miles per hour faster and could easily outclimb the Panther. The swept-wing Soviet aircraft also came armed with three cannons: two 23mm and a single 37mm. The North Korean air force was outfitted

Left: Williams boards his jet fighter for another mission. Above: The cockpit of an F9F-5 reflects its World War II lineage, as did the airplane’s straight wings. Below: Williams’ report that the MiGs he encountered were devoid of markings may have reflected the escalatingunwillingnessSoviettorisktheKorean War.

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The Panther was the Navy’s first successful carrier-based jet fighter. The prototype, pow ered by 5,700 pounds of thrust from a RollsRoyce Nene engine (licensed in the United States as the Pratt & Whitney J42 P-8), first flew

Royce Williams’ road to naval aviation started out rather inauspiciously. Born in South Dakota in 1925, he was a corporal in the Minnesota Na tional Guard when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Hoping for a chance to become a combat pilot, Williams enlisted in the Navy. During the war he flew Grumman F6F Hellcats and Vought F4U Corsairs, primarily on sub-hunting sorties, though he never saw combat. Williams was still in the Navy when the conflict in Korea broke out, and he received jet training and learned how to fly the F9F-5 Panther.

grade,” said Samuel Cox, a retired admiral and current director of Naval History and Heritage Command for the Navy. “I’m convinced that his account is accurate. But that’s the problem: it’s his account and you can’t be your own witness at an upgrade review.”

on November 24, 1947. The production version, the F9F-2, entered Navy service in 1949. Wil liams was flying the most-produced version of the Panther, the F9F-5. Powered by a more pow erful water-injected Pratt & Whitney J48 (an other Rolls Royce-derived engine) and armed with four 20mm cannons, it could also carry rockets and bombs for ground support and at tacks on fortified positions. While the Panther’s role in the Korean conflict has been overshad owed by the Air Force’s North American F-86 Sabre, the single-engine, straight-winged air craft performed admirably for the Navy in more than 78,000 combat missions over Korea.

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Top: An F9F-2 of VF-831 ready to launch from USS Antietam in November 1951. a Panther from VF-781 off from Oriskany

takes

Williams flipped on his gunsight and fired a test burst; he was ready for combat. The next 35 minutes would find him twisting and turning in a deadly dance with the seven Soviet jets, using all his senses and experience to gain the upper hand on the enemy while trying to stay out of theirThegunsights.Navypilot realized he was at a disadvan tage. His Panther could easily fall prey to the swifter MiG-15s if he weren’t careful. Williams would have to rely on his skills as a pilot and take advantage of any errors by his adversaries. “They made mistakes,” he said, “and when they did, I capitalized on them.”

stands

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He got his first chance at the start of the fray. Four of the MiGs zoomed at him, with one firing at but missing the Panther. Williams pulled into a hard climbing turn and came down behind the formation. “As they went on by, that put me in position to shoot at their number four guy,” he recalled. “I was within range and tracking. I fired a short burst and he started smoking and goingWingmandown.”Rowlands followed the damaged jet to the sea. That left Williams alone with the six remaining MiGs. He began making a series of high-G turns to avoid his pursuers and get be hind one of them. The remaining jets quickly climbed to about 2,000 feet above the Panther, turned and dove for a head-on attack. Williams zeroed in on the lead plane and made his move. “I was able to adjust and track on him,” he said. “He was firing on me. When he got in range, I had my gunsight aiming point on him and pulled

with thousands of MiG-15s for the war (and the aircraft reportedly remains in service there today as a trainer). North Korean pilots flew most of them, although a number of aviators were Chinese—and some were Soviets. “It was a completely unique event in the Cold War,” Cox said. “There was nothing else like it. During the Korean War, there were Russian pilots flying Russian aircraft with North Korean markings from bases in Chinese Manchuria. It was all a big secret, but everyone knew because the pilots would speak Russian.” The Oriskany’s presence close to Soviet territory meant that Soviet pilots in Soviet MiGs were also in the vicinity that day.

Above,

now was still blowing across the Oriska ny’s deck when Williams launched with three other Navy pilots into the blizzard, with a ceiling of about 400 feet. Lt. Claire El wood was division leader but he and his wing man, Lt. (jg) John Middleton, were forced to return to the carrier when Elwood’s jet devel oped a mechanical problem. That left Williams,

the section leader, and his wingman, Lt. (jg) Dave Rowlands, alone to fly the patrol.

Williams was expecting trouble, but not from these airplanes. His patrol was providing cover for the task force, which was anticipating repri sals for an earlier attack by U.S. Navy aircraft in North Korea near the Soviet border. But these jets weren’t North Korean—they belonged to the Soviet Union. After Russian radar had picked up the American Panthers, the MiG-15s had scrambled from their air base at Vladivo stok. “They came diving at us and were coming in hot,” Williams remembered recently. “They fired first, so we knew we were in a fight.”

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They struggled through the scud to about 12,000 feet, then broke through into blue skies. The controllers on the carrier alerted them to “bogies” in the area and Williams noticed the contrails of seven aircraft at about 26,000 feet. The two pilots continued their ascent, and then they saw the suspect aircraft split into two groups and start a steep descent.

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fter examining the damage to his Panther, Williams was surprised that he made it back at all. The flight crew counted 263 holes— most of them caused by shrapnel created when the 37mm round exploded in the accessory section of the engine compartment. It appeared that the airplane was a total loss. In fact, Williams heard the jet was going

lently. Williams had lost control of his rudder and flaps and only had par tial use of his ailerons, which he had to operate manually. With Rowlands following, Williams dived toward the clouds at 12,000 feet, porpoising all the way to avoid getting hit again by his pursuer.

“We lost sight of each other in the clouds,” he said. Rowlands lost track of the other airplanes, too, and headed through the clouds back to the car rier. “Normally, I would have ejected but with the cold-water conditions I wouldn’t have lasted long,” said Williams. “It would have been sure death. So I stuck with it and headed back to the task force.” Williams couldn’t have known it at the time, but his encounter with the MiGs was the first and last time U.S. fighters and Russian jets from a base in the Soviet Union would engage in air-to-air combat.

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The perilous battle continued as the combat ants soared and swerved above the clouds. The other three Soviet jets joined the fight and Wil liams had to stay sharp as they tried to knock him out of the air. “One of the jets made a run at me,” he stated. “He didn’t pull up while he was still behind me. He passed in front of me and that set me up for a close-in shot. I hit him good and pieces of his airplane came off. I had to ma neuver to avoid hitting them.”

By that point Rowlands had rejoined the fight, but he soon ran out of ammunition. Williams then fired a burst at another jet, which started smoking. But Williams had also exhausted his ammunition and couldn’t finish off the MiG. In addition, he had another MiG on his tail. The So viet fighter fired and a single 37mm round struck the Panther’s left wing and then passed into the engine area, where it exploded and knocked out the hydraulics. The Panther began shaking vio

Flying at full throttle, Williams radioed in that his plane was severely damaged and he was trying to make it back to the carrier, which was now at general quarters. Unfortunately for him, the gun crews on an escorting destroyer did not receive word, and they opened up on the approaching aircraft until another Navy pilot reported that the incoming airplane was a friendly.“Itoldthe carrier I’m going to be landing at about 200 miles per hour, about 95 miles an hour faster than normal,” Williams said. “I’m also having control problems and can’t line up with the ship. I’m off by about 15 de grees. We also had heavy winds and a pitching deck. It was going to be in teresting!”TheOriskany’s captain, Courtney Shands, was aware of the situation and ordered the ship to alter its course to line up with William’s landing vector. The crippled craft caught the number-three wire on the landing deck and lurched to an abrupt stop.

the trigger with a short burst. He turned away. I think I hit him in the fuel tank. I learned he later crashed and died in the ocean, probably having run out of fuel.”

At that moment, Williams didn’t have the lux ury of wondering what happened to that target. He now had to focus on the enemy’s wingman, who was flying directly at him. The Navy pilot locked on and fired away. “He kept coming at me, but I’m pretty sure he was dead,” Williams said. “He stopped firing and he didn’t maneuver at all. His plane went right under mine and I’m certain that one went right in the water.”

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Landing aboard a flattop in a jet like this Panther on its final approach to Oriskany was always a challenge; doing it in an airplane as badly shot up as Williams’ made the task extra hair-raising. Williams had to rely on a little help from the carrier’s captain to get lined up on his approach.

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Williams remembers being ushered into a room where he saw more admirals and five-star generals than he had ever seen in his life. In ad dition to Eisenhower, generals Omar Bradley and Mark Clark were in attendance. The presi dent-elect’s son, Maj. John Eisenhower, served as bartender. After some initial discussion, Ei senhower asked Williams if he wanted a drink. “We have the world’s greatest scotch here,” the Navy pilot remembers the general saying. Wil liams said he preferred bourbon. Eisenhower wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept offering him scotch. “I didn’t want it,” Williams laughed. “That got the attention of the generals and admi rals. They looked at me like, ‘What is this snotnosed kid up to?’”

Despite Williams’ combat success, Vice Ad miral Robert P. Briscoe ordered him to keep si lent about the air battle. Since the enemy jets were Soviet, there was concern that announcing the news might draw Russia into the war, in which the U.S. and United Nations forces were already battling those of North Korea and China. In addition, Briscoe told Williams that a Na tional Security Agency intelligence team on one of the ships in the task force had been intercept ing Soviet radio messages. If word got out, the Russians might start wondering if the task force had been eavesdropping, imperiling other proj ects. “I was instructed by Admiral Briscoe to never, ever talk about it,” Williams recalled. “We had people who were tracking and listening to the Russians and we didn’t want them to know we had this ability.”

to be dumped into the sea because it was beyond repair. He believed that for decades until he learned that his old airplane had been fixed up and eventu ally saw service in Vietnam.

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“I am the luckiest guy,” Williams chuckled. “We always have raffles and I win about 50 percent of the time. One Christmas, I went to three differ ent parties and won all of the door prizes. It’s amazing!”

From the beginning, Williams believed he got four kills, though he never talked about what happened or protested the Navy’s count. In fact, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to how many Soviet planes went down that day. It wasn’t until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the truth came out. Secret files re leased by the Russians showed that four MiG-15s had been downed during the action. All four pi lots were killed. The Navy never changed the record, though, despite growing evidence that it might be incorrect. With the Russian admission of four Soviet planes being shot down, Williams

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Top: Happy to be in one piece aboard Oriskany, Williams points to 37mm shell damage in his Panther, one of 263 holes his crew counted in the airplane. With or without confirmation of his victories from November 18, 1952, NavycontinuedWilliamsasuccessfulcareer,retiringas a captain in 1980.

One person who did hear about Williams’ en counter with Soviet MiGs was Dwight D. Eisen hower, the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II and now president-elect of the United States. During the 1952 campaign, Eisen hower promised he would go to Korea if elected. He made good on that pledge on December 2, 1952, when he landed in Seoul. Williams and two other Navy pilots from that day—Middleton and Rowlands—received a summons for a high-level session with the president-elect. The three men had been told that Eisenhower wanted to learn more about the MiG-15 and how it stacked up against American aircraft, but Williams doubted that. “I think he just wanted to meet me,” he said. “That was just an excuse.”

For his heroics that cold day in November, Williams received credit for one kill and one probable. Middleton, who had turned back to help Williams, was also recognized with a kill while Rowlands earned a probable. Some histo rians question those numbers and think a review is necessary. The secrecy of that mission and confusing after-battle reports likely led to a less-than-thorough examination of what hap pened that day.

Massachusetts-based author Dave Kindy is a frequent contributor to Aviation History and other HistoryNet publications, as well as Air & Space Quarterly, the Washington Post and Smithsonian. For further reading, he rec ommends Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Korean Air War: Sabres, MiGs and Meteors, 1950-1953 by Michael Napier and “The story of the Top-Secret Dogfight where legendary US Korean War F9F Naval Aviator E. Royce Williams, Jr., shot down 4 Soviet MiG15s,” an article written by Dario Leone for theaviationgeekclub.com

lieves the secrecy about what happened that day over the Sea of Japan has prevented Williams from getting the credit he deserves. For Mach ado, the effort to get him the Medal of Honor is deeply personal. Over the years, she has become close to the retired Navy officer and looks upon him as a father figure. “Captain Royce Williams is a wonderful and dear soul,” she said. “I’m bi ased because I know him so well, but I believe Royce deserves to be acknowledged for that amazingWilliamsfeat.”ended up flying 70 combat missions in Korea. In Vietnam, he flew 110 missions in the Vought F-8E Crusader and McDonnell Douglas F-4B Phantom II. By the time he retired in 1980 as a captain and flag officer he had spent 37 years in the Navy. In all that time he had no mission more remarkable than the one he flew on No vember 18, 1952.

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“I’m flabbergasted,” Williams said about the effort to upgrade his Silver Star. “They’re com paring what I did to Maj. George Davis of the U.S. Air Force, who was credited with shooting down two MiGs on his final flight when he got shot down and killed in Korea in 1952. In short order, they had the Medal of Honor for him.”

was finally free to talk about his role in the air battle that day.

One of those who believes the record should be updated is Cox, who has extensively studied the air battle. “As Director of Naval History, I look at everything I can find,” Admiral Cox said. “I would give him credit for four. I think Royce’s account is pretty doggone accurate. There are discrepancies between all of the reports, but I’m confident that what he said is what happened.”

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Not only should the record be changed, but some believe Williams’ Silver Star should be up graded to the Medal of Honor. U.S. Representa tive Darrell Issa has sponsored a bill authorizing the president to bestow the nation’s highest mil itary award to Williams, who lives in the same congressional district in Southern California as the congressman. Issa wants to see the medal presented to Williams as soon as possible. Though still tough and sharp as ever, the former flyer is 97 years old, making time an issue. The House passed the measure in July 2022 and it advanced to the Senate.

One person who will be particularly pleased if the medal is upgraded is CJ Machado, a film maker who chronicled Williams’ story in the 2017 short film Forgotten Hero . Machado be

On the deck of the USS Midway, now a museum in San Diego, California, Williams visits a Panther painted in the markings his own airplane wore in November 1952. The addition of four “kill marks” belatedly acknowledges his four MiG victories.

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American aviator and millionaire Howard Hughes (in hat) stands atop his colossal flying boat, the Hughes H-4 Hercules, at Long Beach, California, on November 6, 1947. The aircraft had made a brief flight four days earlier. It never flew again.

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Seen here as it was being constructed, the H-4 was the largest airplane of its time. Unfortunately for Howard Hughes, the times were already passing it by, leading to controversy in Washington. The airplane’s wooden structure also led to the popular sobriquet of “Spruce Goose,” a name Hughes hated. In fact, the airplane was largely made of birch.

Texan leveraged the movie’s suc cess when he set out to conquer his next indus try: aviation. In 1932 he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company, a venture spurred by his in terest in air racing. As a pilot, Hughes set several world airspeed records and won numerous awards, including the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938, the Collier Trophy in 1938 and the Bi besco Cup of the Fédération Aéronautique In ternationale, also in 1938. That year he com pleted an around-the-world flight in just over 91 hours, smashing the previous record by almost four days. Upon his return, New York City show ered him with a ticker-tape parade. More prizes followed. He received a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 “for advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to this

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The1930.lanky

oward Hughes called it the H-4 Hercules—a fitting name for the largest and most powerful airplane of its time. The press, however, dubbed his prized creation the “Spruce Goose”—a name Hughes despised. But the label stuck, and the big airplane became another part of Hughes’ enig matic legacy—a story of how one man’s uncompromising ambition propelled his remarkable ascendancy and eventual descent into madness. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the infamous seaplane’s maiden (and only) flight.

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Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born on De cember 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. His father, a Harvard-educated lawyer, patented a specialized drill bit that let him pioneer the ex ploration of previously unreachable fossil fuel reserves. The invention led to hefty profits during the Texas oil boom, wealth his 18-yearold son later inherited as the sole heir of the fam ily’s estate. Not surprisingly, the footloose teen ager dropped out of college and headed for the West Coast with his eyes set on the movies. The 1927 WWI drama Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture) inspired Hughes to make his own air combat epic, but one that was bigger and better. Commencing pro duction in 1927, Hughes’ Hell’s Angels endured a steady barrage of mishaps over the next three years. The costly setbacks involved no less than five directors (including Hughes), four fatalities, several flying accidents (also including Hughes), the 1929 stock market crash, and the advent of sound in the movies, which required reshoots and recasting. Nonetheless, Hell’s Angels tri umphed as a remarkable cinematic achievement (albeit with some clunky acting) upon its release in

During the early stages of World War II, German U-boats virtually feasted on Allied cargo vessels in the Battle of the Atlantic. These heavy losses prompted the U.S. War Production Board to explore alternative ways of transporting materiel and troops to Britain. Steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser, widely regarded as the father of modern American shipbuilding, proposed creating a fleet of flying cargo ships that could pass over the menacing Nazi wolf packs. Before he could do that, though, he needed a partner with aviation expertise. The gregarious businessman approached several leading aeronautical manufacturers, but they all passed on the

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scheme. Undaunted, Kaiser turned to Hughes. The celebrated movie mogul turned record-set ting aviator had built his reputation by taking huge risks and proving naysayers wrong. Build ing a 200-ton flying boat should be no different.

Left: Two engineers are dwarfed by the four right-wing Pratt & Whitney engines of the big boat as it is readied for taxi tests in Los Angeles Harbor on November 1, 1947. Right: Hughes’ weightseaplanebecomeofKaiser,shipbuildercollaborator,HenryJ.poseswithamodelwhatwouldeventuallyan8-enginewithagrossof150-200tons.

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months. Kaiser boasted they’d have it done in less than a year. With marching orders in hand, the two disparate tycoons went to work in the fall of 1942.

Kaiser’s joint venture with Hughes secured an $18 million government contract for designing, engineering and constructing three flying boat prototypes. The project, however, came with a laundry list of restrictions. The mandate, for ex ample, forbade them from using critical materi als like steel or aluminum or hiring anyone al ready engaged in the war effort. And one more thing: the prototype had to be completed in 24

ughes insisted that the airplane, origi nally designated HK-1, would have a gross weight of 400,000 pounds and be capable of shuttling 750 fully equipped troops or two 30-ton M4 Sherman tanks across the ocean. Progress was slow. In addition to his obses sive-compulsive tendencies, Hughes often dis appeared for months at a time, engaging in a spate of activities that included his production of The Outlaw (1943), for which he applied his engineering skills to design a brassiere for star Jane Russell. The decade also saw Hughes sur vive two horrific air accidents. In March 1943, while test-flying a modified amphibian Sikorsky S-43, he crashed into Lake Mead in southern Ne vada. Two men died, and Hughes had to be res cued by one of the other crew members. Three years later, his twin-engine XF-11 reconnais sance plane, which the U.S. Army Air Forces had commissioned, developed a propeller malfunc tion mid-flight. He attempted to land on a golf course but went down in a Beverly Hills neigh borhood, destroying three houses. Hughes barely escaped the burning, mangled wreckage before being rushed to the hospital, where emer gency room staff didn’t expect him to live. He spent the next five weeks laid up with a collapsed lung, nine fractured ribs, broken vertebrae and third-degree burns. Miraculously, he managed to recover (but had to grow a mustache to cover scars on his upper lip). Hughes also developed a severe addiction to opiates—a condition that

country throughout the world.” Additionally, the young entrepreneur recognized the poten tial of commercial air travel and gradually be came the majority shareholder of Transconti nental & Western Air (the predecessor of TWA). With his money and his aviation expertise, Hughes seemed like the perfect man for Henry Kaiser’sKaiserproject.andHughes made an odd couple. The portly industrialist was 23 years older than Hughes and had an oval, bespectacled face that gave him the air of a nearsighted bullfrog. Exud ing a boisterous affability, he attended church regularly and preached wholesome family val ues. Hughes, a playboy who kept company with the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, did not. Kaiser was the son of German immi grants and began working at age 13 as an errand boy at a dry goods store in Utica, New York, hon ing a work ethic that would serve him well. In 1914, he founded a paving company that ad vanced the use of heavy construction machinery and later became the primary contractor for the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams. He then revolutionized shipbuilding by mass-pro ducing Liberty Ships for the United States gov ernment’s war effort.

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The defiant maverick came out swinging. “I am by nature a perfectionist, and I seem to have trouble allowing anything to go through in a half-perfect condition,” Hughes said. “So if I made any mistake, it was in working too hard and in doing too much of it with my own two hands.” Hughes continued to defend himself vig orously in front of a packed live audience. “The Hercules was a monumental undertaking...It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation rolled up in it, and I have stated that if it was a failure, I probably will leave this coun try and never come back, and I mean it.”

Construction of the hull relied on an elaborate process using Duramold, a lightweight material like plywood in which layers of thin veneers were bonded together with waterproof resins. Its catchy nickname aside, the plane consisted mainly of birch and was covered in fabric. The enormous scale presented unique challenges— obstacles that Hughes resolved with ingenuity. The filmmaker set up projectors at his aircraft facility to display blueprints onto the floor, al lowing his engineers to manufacture parts to size. Hughes’s flair for innovation extended to pioneering the first hydraulically actuated con trol unit, which complemented a 120-volt D.C. electrical system to manipulate the huge control

plagued him for the rest of his life.

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On August 6, 1947, Hughes appeared before the Senate War Investigating Committee to de fend himself against accusations that he had misused government funds. During five days of intense questioning in the sensationalized hear ing, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine led the attack, declaring, “The Spruce Goose is a flying lumberyard and will never fly.”

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By 1944, Kaiser had had enough of Hughes and dissolved the partnership. The self-made millionaire promptly returned to building con ventional floating transports, eventually leaving his mark on everything from automobiles (Kai ser Motors) to x-rays (Kaiser-Permanente). Meanwhile, Hughes pressed forward with a team of handpicked personnel, headed by his chief designer, Glenn Odekirk. The government agreed to extend the deadline, but continuous delays and wasteful spending required Hughes to pump millions of his own money into what was now known as the H-4. Exact figures of the cost vary, owing to Hughes’ notoriously secre tive nature and penchant for exaggerating the truth, but the work continued.

Coincidentally, Brewster had recently spon sored a national airline bill that would have handed Pan-American Airways—TWA’s main rival—a monopoly on lucrative government air line passenger and mail routes. Hughes seized the opportunity to counterattack, accusing the New Englander of blatant corruption and collu sion with Pan Am. The committee temporarily adjourned, having devolved into a media circus that saw Hughes emerge as the clear winner in the court of public opinion. He then returned to California and focused his undivided attention on completing the H-4. With crews working in shifts around the clock, the aviator set a date for a series of taxi trials. Vindication awaited.

surfaces. A series of intercom radio points en abled immediate communication with engi neers positioned inside the cavernous fuselage. Most impressively, the wingspan measured 320 feet 11 inches, a record that stood until 2019. Eight Pratt & Whitney R-4360 28-cylinder ra dial engines with 17-foot propellers generated a combined 24,000 horsepower for an intended range of 3,000 miles at a cruising speed of around 200 mph. The sheer size of the mam moth parts necessitated moving them from Hughes Airport to a larger facility in Long Beach, a slow, 28-mile trek in which power lines had to be lowered on streets along the way. The winged freighter finally neared completion in 1947, when the war had been over for two years. Leaders in Washington accused its famous builder of malfeasance and war profiteering.

Hughes sits inside the cavernous interior of his flying boat on November 6, 1947. He had intended to create an airplane that could carry 750 soldiers or two Sherman tanks. In the end, the aircraft ended up costing the government $18 million and Hughes considerably more than that, but it never carried anything except for its crew and a few passengers on its only flight.

Christopher Warner is an actor and freelance writer. He has written extensively about mili tary history, including the experiences of his great-uncle, who flew combat gliders in WWII. For further reading he recommends Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, and Build ’Em by the Mile, Cut ’Em off by the Yard: How Henry J. Kaiser and the Rosies Helped Win World War II by Steve Gilford.

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The Aero Club of Southern California later acquired the Spruce Goose and displayed it in a huge geodesic dome next to the ocean liner Queen Mary in Long Beach. But the airplane had one trip left. In 1993, following a serpentine journey by barge, train and truck, the historic aircraft arrived at its current home in McMinn ville, Oregon. There, it commands top billing at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, at tracting visitors worldwide who come to marvel at the jaw-dropping sight—or even sit in the cockpit while wearing Hughes’s iconic hat. Like its eccentric creator, the Spruce Goose is in a class by itself.

creasingly eccentric recluse died in 1976.

“I like to make surprises,” Hughes said.

ughes was ready to unveil his creation on November 1, 1947. Sporting his lucky whiskey-colored fedora, Hughes manned the controls with the support of a 20-man crew. The seaplane also carried seven members of the press and seven other invited guests. But blus tery conditions forced him to postpone the event for a day. On November 2, Hughes guided the silver-lacquered behemoth into Long Beach Harbor. A flotilla of small boats joined thou sands of spectators lining the shores.

Top: Hughes flies his jumbo flying boat outside Long Beach on November 2, 1947, reaching an altitude of 70 feet for about one mile. His copilot, David Grant, was a hydraulic engineer who did not have a pilot’s license. Above: In 1993 the Spruce Goose came home to roost at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

Hughes completed the first taxi at low speed before re-positioning for another run at 90 mph. The thunderous roar of eight 28-cylinder P&W engines filled the air, but persistent winds ap peared to scuttle any attempts to get airborne.

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James McNamara, a radio reporter who had remained on board to record a live broadcast, excitedly turned to the pilot. “Howard, did you expect that?”

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As a result, most of the newsmen requested to go ashore and file their stories. They’d soon come to regret it. On the third trial, Hughes ordered his flight engineer to “lower 15 degrees of flap” as he throttled into a stiff headwind. Suddenly, the Hercules flexed its muscles, lifting out of the water for 26 seconds and reaching an altitude of 70 feet before gently touching down.

The H-4 never flew again. Hughes insisted that it had been built for “testing and research and to provide knowledge which will advance the art of aviation.” Whether the colossal beast could have ever become operational is debat able. Regardless, Hughes had proved his point: Brewster and the other critics were forced to eat their words. Over the years, Hughes made sev eral modifications to his airplane, including add ing a steel spiral staircase to the flight deck. He kept the H-4 in pristine condition and housed it in a specially constructed climate control facil ity at the cost of $1 million per year until the in

Never Panic Early, Fred Haise appears to go out of his way not to emulate prior astronaut autobiographies. He briefly details his youth in Biloxi, Mississippi, before moving on to his real passion: flying airplanes. In 1952, at the age of 18, Haise enrolled in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, and you can practically taste his enthusiasm when he writes about military aviation. The sections about flight training are the most enjoyable parts of the book.

mission to the point of exhaustion, so he sees no need to repeat it. Similarly, he dismisses with a wave the news that his chance to command Apollo 19 (and walk on the moon) evaporated when the mission was cancelled.

Haise’s account of his time at NASA is sur prisingly flat. His description of Apollo 13 oc cupies only a small portion of the entire man uscript, as though Haise has discussed the

Overall, this is an unusual volume. Haise is a tremendously accomplished pilot and had a firsthand view of some monumental events in American history, but it seems that he has sim ply moved on from those episodes. One gets the sense he wants to tell other stories from his life, most of which involve flying airplanes . —Douglas G. Adler

Fred Haise (third from right) stands with his colleagues in the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test program in front of the space shuttle prototype Enterprise. From left to right are Fitz Fulton, Gordon Fullerton, Vic Horton, Haise, Vincent Alvarez and Tom McMurtry.

The book picks up steam again with Haise’s description of his time working on the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test (ALT) pro gram when he tested the Space Shuttle proto type Enterprise. This is stuff of real pilots, Haise seems to say, and his enthusiasm shines through. The ALT chapter is among the best in the book.

Moore, Smithsonian Books, 2022, $24.95 66 WINTER 2023 NASA

by Fred Haise with Bill

After the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957, Haise became a research pilot with the Na tional Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the forerunner of NASA) and made his way to Edwards Air Force Base to work along side Chuck Yeager. Haise mentions his appli cation to the space program only briefly, and it seems that being passed over would not have upset him. He even suggests that if he had had the opportunity to fly the X-15 at Edwards he might not have applied at all.

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An Apollo JourneyAstronaut’s13

F4U CORSAIR VS A6M

AN HAISEWITHINTERVIEWFRED

Drones are now employed by militaries around the world for myriad missions, including recon naissance, precision strike, jamming and decoy ing. It was not always the case. In this heavily illustrated book, defense journalist David Axe does an excellent job tracing the history of Viet nam War-era drone development and deploy ment, pointing out that America’s use of robotic surveillance aircraft during the 1960s-70s started as a response to the shootdown of Fran cis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile on May 1, 1960.

As we went into that program, NASA had to announce a several years’ slip in the orbital flight because of the tile problem. We also faced a new president having come in and it wasn’t his program. It was Nixon’s program. And President Carter had come in. And so, we worried about those aspects. We had no backup. We had a second Enterprise when we started the program. But quickly for cost—the program costs were cut early—we deleted it, so we had no backup vehicle. You don’t like that situation in a test program.

DRONE WAR VIETNAM

Adler asked about the times the Enterprise was released from the top of a modified Boe ing 747, which Haise said was more danger ous to the people in the airplane than the as tronauts testing the shuttle.

Contrary to the television series “Black Sheep Squadron,” Marine F4Us did not shoot down scores of Zeros for every Corsair lost. In fact, Mi chael John Claringbould’s research reveals that both sides wildly over-claimed their aerial victo ries, in the U.S.’s case by a ratio of four-to-one and on the Japanese side closer to five-to-one.

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1943-44theRabaulZERO-SENandSolomons

Although frequently touted by the U.S. Marines as the greatest fighter of World War II, the Vought F4U-1 Corsair had actually been rejected by the U.S. Navy for use on aircraft carriers. Con sequently, the first operational F4Us were de ployed to Marine squadrons in the Solomons in February 1943. By January 1944 no less than 18 land-based F4U squadrons were operational in the South Pacific.

by Michael Publishing,Claringbould,JohnOsprey2022,$22

F4U CORSAIR VS A6M ZERO-SEN Rabaul and the Solomons, 1943-44

The book’s main focus is on Ryan Aeronauti cal, which was already making the jet-powered, swept-wing Firebee target drone and had seen the possibilities of a reconnaissance version even before the Powers incident. The company modified its baseline drone with the installation of surveillance gear, starting the Model 147 se ries under the name Firefly and later Lightning Bug. As the Vietnam War spooled up, the logic of using unmanned recce platforms to supplement piloted flights resulted in 1,106 Ryan drones fly ing 3,435 wartime missions.

Although early Corsair units initially suffered heavy losses against Zeros, that disparity was clearly attributable more to pilot skill and expe rience than to the quality of the aircraft. By early 1944, increased U.S. combat experience and at trition among irreplaceable veteran Japanese fighter pilots turned the tables the other way.

Fielding these unmanned air vehicles in an active combat environment was fraught with challenges, for if the North Vietnamese SAMs or MiGs did not blast them out of the sky, they might lose contact with their mothership con trollers and fly off course. Even when things went well in the air, sometimes the Lightning

As an Australian raised in Papua, New Guinea, the author of this addition to Osprey’s “Duel” series has had a long fascination with the Pacific War. F4U Corsair vs A6M Zero-Sen delves into both American and Japanese records to present a balanced and impartial reassessment of two famous South Pacific antagonists. It should be of great value to those interested in aviation his tory or the Pacific War. —Robert Guttman

VIETNAM by David Axe, Pen & Sword Military, 2021, $42.95

In this excerpt from an interview with Fred Haise, Douglas G. Adler asked the former astro naut about his time working on the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test (ALT) program. Haise referred to this period as “the highlight of my career.”

Yeah, we were on top of the 747, and had we gone out of control at release, had we dam aged the 747, that crew could not have gotten out. They had no escape system, whereas my self and Gordo Fullerton, we were sitting in ejection seats. So, we had a plan B that hope fully would have enabled us to survive. But Fitz Fulton and Tom McMurtry and Vic Horton and Skip Guidry would have all died had we seriously damaged that 747. This transcript has been edited for publication. To see the entire interview, go to www.history net.com/haise-interview.

While justifiably concentrating on Zeppelin crews and Britain’s nascent night fighters, Cas tle also addresses the gruesome consequences of urban bombing. The technology of the time se verely limited bombing precision, especially in bad weather. Thus, targets were mostly random, leaving parents childless; children suddenly or phaned; and homes and shops of no military value destroyed. Castle’s painstaking research identifies the 300 Britons killed in German air attacks of 1916—a roster apparently uncom

ROYAL JAGDSTAFFELBAVARIAN76

The Forgotten Blitz 1916

Bugs would parachute into terrain that made re covery problematic. The author provides much detail on how Ryan engineers overcame opera tional hurdles through technological innova tions. At war’s end, the Lightning Bug faded into historical obscurity, but it had paved the way for the drones that are now indispensable tools in modern warfare. —Philip Handleman

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by Ian FrontlineCastle,Books, 2022, $42.95

ECHOES FROM DAWN SKIES Early Aviators, A Lost RediscoveredManuscript

It seems incredible that Merriam was unable to interest anyone in publishing his book. The manuscript gathered dust for decades and not until after Merriam died could his granddaugh ter attract the interest of a publisher. Now, seemingly resurrected from oblivion, this veri table treasure trove of firsthand information has finally been made available to the reading pub lic. For anyone interested in aviation, and espe cially those who delighted in the 1965 film clas sic, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Ma chines, Echoes from Dawn Skies will be an abso lute must-read and—belated though it is—an instant classic. —Robert Guttman

There are many books about aviation history, but comparatively little has been written about aviation prior to World War I, and even less from a first-person perspective. So, Echoes from Dawn Skies stands out as something special. Author Frederick Warren Merriam (1880-1956) was among the first qualified British pilots and later in life decided to compile a book of first-person accounts from Britain’s pioneer days of aviation. To do so, he contacted many people connected with early aviation to solicit their anecdotes and impressions. The result is a fascinating collec tion written by and about a veritable “who’swho” of early fliers and aircraft designers, in cluding Orville Wright, Oswald Short, Geoffrey de Havilland, Frederick Handley Page, Richard Fairey, Thomas Sopwith and A.V. Roe.

by Bruno Schmäling, Reinhard Kastner and Jörn AeronautLeckscheid,Books, 2022, $49.99

BlitzTheINFERNOZEPPELINForgotten1916

ZEPPELIN INFERNO

by Frederick Warren Merriam, Air World, 2022, $34.95

After the United States declared war on them on April 6, 1917, the Germans launched a crash cam paign to counter the coming arrival of American aircraft to the Western Front. Called the Amer ika Programm , it doubled Germany’s fighter squadrons, or Jagdstaffeln , on paper. In prac tice, it gathered whatever second-rate fighters were available around a cadre of experienced leaders and newly trained airmen. Conse quently, while the famous older Jastas kept producing numerous aces, the Amerika Pro

gramm units struggled just to survive against the growing Allied might.

Royal Bavarian Jagdstaffel 76 gives a detailed history of one such Amerika Programm unit— one of several created specifically for Bavarians. Authors Bruno Schmäling, Reinhard Kastner and Jörn Leckscheid are Bavarian themselves and in the late 1970s they interviewed many sur viving members of Jasta 76b, including first commander and sole ace Walter Böning, who had preserved the squadron log. These three dedicated historians have assembled a fascinat ing look at a fighter unit whose pilots made the best of what they had. Besides the human narra tive, the book has 174 photos, and 36 profiles of Albatros, Pfalz and Fokkers, whose colorful markings are explained by their relation to his toric heraldry as well as personal choices. Top ping things off are a surprising number of flying reproductions of Jasta 76b Albatros D.Vas, in cluding one restoration based on remains of an actual airplane of the unit that were found in a French swamp. From any of several angles, Royal Bavarian Jagdstaffel 76 is one outstanding unit history that deserves a place on any WWI avia tion enthusiast’s bookshelf. —Jon Guttman

ECHOES FROM DAWN SKIES Early Aviators, A Lost Manuscript Rediscovered

ROYAL BAVARIAN JAGDSTAFFEL 76

Ian Castle has become “Mr. Zeppelin” among World War I historians. His 2018 volume, Zeppelin Onslaught, described German airship opera tions over Britain in 1914-1915. Zeppelin Inferno resumes the narrative with accounts of 1916 German Army and Navy missions as well as Brit ish defenses. Inferno details the 22 airship raids between January and November 1916, totaling 123 sorties. In the same period Germany launched 14 “aeroplane” raids. Losses among Kaiser Wilhelm’s dirigibles only increased from 1916, and the German Army disbanded its air ship service. Castle explains that due to unsus tainable attrition, only nine more U.K. Zeppelin raids were flown for the rest of the war, with Go thas and Giants (Riesen) filling the gap.

TEST PILOT

Zeppelin Inferno is bound to be come a standard reference about military aviation from more than a century ago. —Barrett Tillman

An Extraordinary Career Testing Civil Aircraft

by Chris Taylor, Air World, 2022, $49.95

Wings Over the Channel

2022

“A

that delivers an effective

- Kirkus Reviews AVHP-221011-001 Fiona Yacht Books 'Wings Over the Channel'.indd 1 8/25/22

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by Eric B. Forsyth

Test Pilot is the autobiography by someone who has flown more than 400 different types of air craft. Earning his pilot’s license at the age of 17, Chris Taylor served in the Royal Navy, flying helicop ters off the flight decks of small warships. After graduating from the Empire Test Pilots’ School at Boscombe Down, Taylor became a professional test pilot of fixed and rotary-winged aircraft (and an in structor of test pilots). For Taylor, the focus of flight-testing has al ways been all about “making fly ing safer,” but he includes enough vivid descriptions of “the scrapes I have got out of” to satisfy most readers. Nevertheless, he says the real reason he wrote this book was so his grandchildren could “read about some of the things I have got up to” in the course of a 40year flying career. The result is a fascinating and highly readable book. —Robert Guttman

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Aviation History 2. (ISSN: 1076-8858) 3. Filing date: 10/1/22. 4. Issue frequency: Quar terly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 8. Complete mail ing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor, Tom Huntington, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor in Chief, Dana Shoaf , HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 10. 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Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 5,908. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 6,000. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preced ing 12 months: 28,432. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 27,363. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 605. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 439. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 605. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 439. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 29,037. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 27,802. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 15,997. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 16,957. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 45,034. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 44,759. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 97.9% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 98.4% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 28,432. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 27,363. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Elec tronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 29,037. Actual number of copies of single is sue published nearest to filing date: 27,802. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 97.9%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 98.4%. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the Winter 2022 issue of the publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Kelly Facer, SVP, Revenue Operations. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or in formation requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

Published by Yacht Fiona Books ©

AVIATIONHISTORY

pleted by the government. In al most every instance Castle cites the victim’s age and location, an enormousExtremelytask.well documented with 23 pages of notes, Inferno also provides appendices that in clude all German airship and air craft raids against Britain during the year. The obvious omission is a list of the Zeppelins lost on mis sions over Britain, as seven fell to fighters and at least one to AA guns. Eight maps or illustrations and more than 40 photos provide readers with an excellent variety. The maps of U.K. locations are particularly helpful to American readers who may be largely unfa miliar with the geography.

The continuing adventures of RAF pilot Allan Chadwick, now posted to the RAF research center at Farnborough. It’s the mid-1930s and war with Nazi Germany seems imminent. Chadwick is involved in a frantic effort to build an effective radar defense and uses an early model Spitfire for liaison with outlying stations, flying in fair weather or foul. He falls in love with an older, aristocratic widow involved with an appeasement clique which has been penetrated by German spies intent on gathering information about the new radar system. Kirkus Reviews calls this novel a “page-turner,” and notes that Forsyth’s “snappy pacing and the sly undercurrent of humor (including a running gag about Chadwick’s behemoth old Bentley) keep the whole tale moving along briskly.”

The author was an RAF pilot and is an award-winning global sailor and retired engineer. His book An Inexplicable Attraction: My Fifty Years of Ocean Sailing was among Kirkus’s 100 Best Memoirs of 2018.

Available in paperback and e-book worldwide wherever books are sold online, including Amazon.com rousing, detailed RAF thriller climax.”

D. Dassault Mystère 20

D. Rockwell Sabreliner Model 80A

D. de Havilland DH87B Hornet Moth

B. Cessna Citation I

GETTING DOWN—OR UP—TO BUSINESS

C. Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante

B. British Aerospace Jetstream 41

A. Hamburger Flugzeugbau HFB-320 Hansa

A. Stinson V.77 Reliant B. Spartan Executive C. Miles M.3A Falcon Major

A. Grumman Gulfstream GII B. Dassault Mystère 20

A. Dassault Falcon 10 B. Aérospatiale SN 601Corvette

D. Mitsubishi MU-2

2. Which successful business jet debut of 1963 was based on a medium range airliner?

C. Hamburger Flugzeugbau HFB-320 Hansa

ANSWERS:MYSTERYSHIP:PIAGGIOP-180AVANTI.AQUATICBIRDS:1.E,2.D,3.A,4.H,5.C,6.I, 7.G,8.B,9.J,10.F.GETTINGDOWN—ORUP—TOBUSINESS:1.B,2.D,3.C,4.B,5.A. Saunders-Roe Princess FLIGHT TEST Match the seaplane with its specialty. Can you identify this sleek twin-pusher business turboprop? AQUATIC BIRDS A. Two-seat floatplane fighter monoplane B. Submarine-launchedfloatplanebomber C. Six-turboprop and all-metal flying boat airliner D. Turboprop air-sea rescue amphibious flying boat E. Single-seat sesquiplane flying boat fighter F. Amphibious recon/rescue biplane flying boat G. Transatlantic triple triplane flying boat H. Floatplane dive bomber and reconnaissance plane I. Twin-turbofan general purpose amphibian J. Jet fighter flying boat 1. Macchi M.5 2. ShinMaywa US-2 3. BrHansa-andenburgW.29 4. Aichi E16A1 Zuiun 5. Saunders-RoePrincess 6. Beriev Be-200 Altair 7. Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo 8. Aichi M6A1 Seiran 9. Saunders-RoeSR.A/1 10. WSupermarinealrus RICHARDSON/ALAMYROLFBOTTOM:ZAMMIT/ALAMY;GORDONTOP:

C. Pilatus PC-12

MYSTERY SHIP

A. Beechcraft B200 Super King Air

C. Grumman Gulfstream GII

AVHP-WINTER-FLIGHT TEST.indd 70 8/26/22 1:45 PM

1. Which private plane was famous for combining speed with luxury in the 1930s?

5. Which was the most successful turboprop business plane, with 3,500 produced over 40 years?

70 XXXXXXXXXX WINTER 2023

D. Cessna Citation I

3. Which business jet of the 1960s stood out for its forward-swept wings?

4 Which of these general aviation designs of 1970-1973 was not a success?

A majestic forbidding land, a very dark desert, magnificent desolation, or a really groovy place? HOW DID BUZZ LANDSCAPE?THEFIRSTALDRINDESCRIBELUNAR For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/MAGAZINES/QUIZ ANSWER: MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION. BUZZ ALDRIN, THE SECOND MAN TO WALK THE LUNAR SURFACE, SPOKE THESE WORDS SHORTLY AFTER NEAL ARMSTRONG SAID “THAT’S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.” _HOUSE_BUZZALDRIN.indd 40 8/25/22 5:02 PM

During another test flight on February 18, 2022, the P-40, with Parker again at the con trols, flew alongside a fellow World War II veteran: a Kittyhawk P-40-N-1, CU number A29-448, which had crashed while serving with the Royal Australian Air Force in New Guinea. Recovered and restored by Pioneer Aero, it is now owned by New Zealand War birds. The pilot on this occasion was Parker’s wife, Liz Needham, a seasoned pilot in her own right. —Jon Guttman

FINAL APPROACH

72 WINTER 2023 CONROY/CLASSICGAVIN PHOTOGRAPHYAIRCRAFT AVHP-FINAL APPROACH-WINTER 2022.indd 72 8/30/22 7:47 AM

REBORN

In 1997 a recovery team used a Kamov Ka-25 helicopter to raise the remarkably in tact airplane and sold it to a British collector. After going through a succession of owners, it was eventually restored by Pioneer Aero Ltd. in Ardmore, New Zealand. Following 11 years of restoration work, pilot Frank Parker took the P-40 up for its first flight in nearly 80 years on November 11, 2021.

Built in 1941, the Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk with the serial number 41-13570 had a brief but violent career in World War II. Shipped to the Soviet port of Murmansk as part of LendLease, the P-40 was assigned to the 20th GvIAP (Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment), based at Murmashi airfield, just south of the city. On June 1, 1942, Junior Lieutenant A.V. Pshenev was flying the airplane on a mission to escort Tupolev SB bombers to attack the German airfield at Petsamo in Finland when the Rus sian pilot was attacked by enemy Messer schmitt Me-109Fs and forced to ditch in the semi-frozen Lake Ozero Kod-Yavr west of Murmansk. Pshenev made it to shore, cold and shaken but otherwise unhurt, as the P-40 sank. Credited with the kill was Oberleutnant Horst Carganico, commander of II Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 5.

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