Flight Journal

DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, technological leaps in aircraft design and performance recast the nature of air warfare. The relentless process of technical refinement and manufacturing produced advances like jet engines, pressurized cabins, radar, computers, rocket propulsion, synthetic rubber, and the Norden bombsite—too many to list! At that time, a number of aircraft designers were experimenting with different, lightweight materials for aircraft construction. Shortages of war materials, including aluminum alloys and steel, accelerated the demand for these materials and innovative manufacturing processes. Enter Otto Timm and his designers from the little-known Timm Aircraft company and their N2T-1 “Tutor” low-wing trainer, similar to the Fairchild PT-19, -23, and -26 models. It was constructed from Aeromold, a strong, resin-infused molded plywood that was bonded and baked—an early composite material. Here at Flight Journal, there…

I AM APPROACHING THE AGE at which we begin to lose our faculties. I no longer run; I creak when I walk. Hair grows in all the wrong places. My eyesight, once as sharp as an eagle’s, is hopelessly blurred without bifocals, and I am useless for almost all things after 9 p.m. I am probably also boring (except to my grandchildren when I do magic tricks) and perhaps at the point of becoming a legend in my own mind. If all that is so, I’ll deal with it. But indulge me one memory—a memory in my life that persists in vivid detail as clearly as on the day it happened. It is the “The Great Risinger raid of 1968”—the absolute dumbest damned thing I have ever been involved with…

Since the beginning of the war, the British, along with their commonwealth allies, fought the Italian Army, the biting sand flies, the blistering heat and cold, damp nights along with choking sandstorms as their front-lines seesawed back and forth in “the blue.” Eventually, the British pushed Mussolini’s troops to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, with triumph in their grasp. But their victory was short lived because in early 1941, Gen. Erwin Rommel—the famed Desert Fox of the Afrika Korps—took command of the Axis force and in less than 18 months took back everything the British had gained. Now it was the British and their beleaguered Desert Air Force that had their backs against the pyramid walls of Egypt. If they couldn’t hold there, the oil wells of Iran and…

By the early 1930s, the Army Air Corps was no longer interested in the “ancient technology” of biplane fighters. For a very short while, the Army Air Corp thought they had the ultimate fighter on their hands. The P-40 was sleek and fast and carried an assortment of machine guns above its nose and in the wings. By the time 1942 was in full swing, the P-40 was basically shoved aside as newer fighter models were coming on line at a rapid rate. But none of that stopped the Curtiss Company from trying to make the P-40 even better. P-40s followed the alphabet and began producing P-40Bs with a 1,150-horsepower Allison engine giving it a top speed of right around 345mph. The P-40B/C weighed in at just over 5,800 pounds empty…

The Americans christened the P-40F the Warhawk (more fitting and aggressive than the British moniker of Kittyhawk II), and it saw action on many fronts, including the Pacific. It was here, on a quiet former battle ground of World War II, that one of Curtiss’ combat-hardened warriors was to survive through to the 1970s, as a forgotten wreck on the island of Espiritu Santo. Fate, however, was to deal P-40F-15 USAAF serial 41-19841, manufacturing serial no. 19503, a lucky hand. The aircraft was to be acquired by The Fighter Collection and selected for restoration by the Collection’s driving force, Stephen Grey. In Grey’s owns words, “When found, the airframe was in a largely complete but distressed state, most of her systems having been stripped out. Economics and lack of parts contributed…

OTTO WILLIAM TIMM gave Charles Lindbergh “his first ride in an airplane.” It’s a fact Ed Newberg is fond of relating. Like Newberg, Timm was a native Minnesotan, born in Lakeville, a suburb of Minneapolis about two hours east of Hector, the farming town near where Newberg grew up. Timm was a pioneer aviator who built and flew a replica Curtiss Pusher in 1911 and went on to design and build airplanes under his own name beginning in 1916, while also flying aircraft from other makers. In 1921 in Lincoln, Nebraska, he test-flew a Lincoln Standard L.S.5, a modified Standard J biplane that could seat five people. Lincoln was home to the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation’s flying school. Lindbergh was a student there and met Timm in February, 1922. Two months later,…