Aviation History

You’ll find much more from Aviation History on the web’s leading history resource: historynet.com HOW THE B-25 BECAME THE ULTIMATE STRAFER OF WORLD WAR II A featured player in the movie Catch-22, the North American B-25 Mitchell was intended to be a medium bomber. Instead, the Mitchell found its true calling in World War II as a low-level attack bomber and strafer. historynet.com/b25bomber UNFETTERED TURKEYS: AIRPLANES THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER FLOWN It’s easy enough to design a bad airplane, but it takes real gumption to put it into production. Got a favorite airplane to hate? Here are our picks of seven not-so-magnificent aircraft that should not have advanced beyond the drawing boards. historynet.com/unfettered-turkeys HOW “HUNDRED TAKES HUGHES” GOT HIS NICKNAME Roscoe Turner’s Sikorsky S-29-A was destroyed during the filming of the 1930 movie Hell’s Angels. That…

I just read your article on the original fire bombers (“A Baptism by Fire”) in the May 2022 issue of Aviation History. A couple of years ago, while having lunch with the guys at the airport in Madera, California, I mentioned an N3N in Chico for sale on the internet. A friend said, “After lunch let’s go look at it.” We did, and he bought Mr. Mendocino, Harold Hendrickson’s fire bomber. I had no idea what that nose art meant until I read the article. It will be protected now—it’s precious. I have flown Mr. Mendocino—proud then, even prouder now! Bill Hoffrage Madera, California THE REAL FIRST With all due respect to Colonel Harry A. Halverson, he was not the first to bomb the Ploesti oilfields in Romania (Flight Test, May 2022). The…

Mike Fithian approached his re-creation of a 1912 Etrich Taube with compulsive workmanship and attention to detail. That’s because he wanted to build a faithful representation of the airplane his grandfather had flown in World War I. He succeeded. Robert Eyb was a pilot in the tiny Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Air Service during the run-up to World War I. When his maternal grandson sought a building venture, Fithian recalled a photograph he had seen of Grandpa Eyb and his airplane. The original Taube was not designed as a warbird, for it first flew in 1910. When it did go to war, it achieved notoriety as the world’s first bomber, after an Italian Army Taube in 1911 dropped several grapefruit-size grenades on Bedouin troops in Libya who were allied with Turkey during the…

This summer a Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker with the tail number 60-0329 became the latest addition to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The airplane came with a story. Anyone who has refueled from a KC-135 since the airplane arrived in the U.S. Air Force in 1957 can testify that, while the big Boeings made in-air refueling a standard procedure for the Strategic and Tactical Air Commands, such operations were seldom routine. For the crew of 60-0329, one mission in May 1967 proved exceptionally dramatic. The Stratotanker was refueling two Lockheed F-104C Starfighters off Vietnam when it got an emergency request from six Navy planes over the Gulf of Tonkin—two Douglas KA-3 Skywarriors, two Vought F-8 Crusaders and two McDonnell F-4 Phantom IIs that were dangerously low…

In February 2022, Heritage Auctions of Dallas, Texas, sold a leather flying cap once worn by Amelia Earhart on a history-making flight across the Atlantic. The winning bid was $825,000. Earhart is best known today for disappearing during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937. Born in Kansas in 1897, Earhart made her first flight, in a barnstormer’s airplane, when she was 23, began taking flying lessons within two weeks, and bought her own airplane in July 1921. Book publisher George P. Putnam (later Earhart’s husband) arranged to get her onboard a transatlantic flight attempt with pilot Wilmer Stultz and copilot Louis Gordon. The trio took off from Newfoundland on June 17, 1928, in a Fokker F.VII and landed in Wales nearly 21 hours later. Even though only a…

Visitors to the University Hills area of Denver, Colorado, might be surprised to notice the top of a large white aircraft just barely visible behind a tall wooden fence in this residential neighborhood. Peer over the fence and you will see the complete fuselage of a vintage passenger airliner. It is, in fact, all that remains of Charlie-21, one of only four DC-7 airframes still known to exist out of the 338 constructed by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Built in 1954, DC-7 number C-1921 was powered by four piston engines and originally flew for United Airlines before being sold to the Dooley Aircraft Company in Arizona as a charter plane. Eventually outdated, the airplane was due to be scrapped. Instead, Iliff Preschool in Denver purchased the airframe in the early…