Air Warfare
RAF: The Establishment of a Peacetime Service
To understand why the fantasy figure of the airman was created, it is necessary to explore the political establishment of the airforce after the war. To guarantee its place as a permanent military body, the Royal Flying Corps began a series of reforms, under the aegis of General Smuts, in 1917–1918 that ended the division of military and naval aviation…
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XM-246
General Dynamics took their experience and fire-control from the popular and widely-deployed Phalanx CIWS and matched it with 35mm cannon. Both Ford and GD submitted models for testing and Ford was ultimately selected as the winner. In the initial competition for the lucrative $4.5 billion contract, two firms emerged as…
Higbee Attack!
As these photographs graphically shows, the damage inflicted on the stern of the Higbee by Le Xuan Di’s solitary 250-kg bomb was severe. It effectively wrecked the destroyer’s aft 5-in turret, yet miraculously none of the vessel’s crew were killed. Nguyễn Văn Bảy In 1971, Vietnam’s military chiefs laid down…
The Demise of the Luftwaffe Bomber Units
The Hütter Hü 211 was a German prototype long-range reconnaissance and heavy night fighter commissioned by the Reich Air Ministry in late 1944. The project stopped after an air raid destroyed the prototypes before they were finished. The Blohm & Voss Bv P 188 was a long-range, heavy jet…
Luftwaffe – The Battle of the Atlantic
Fw 200, “SG+KS” of I.Gruppe/KG 40. Three He 111 bombers were flying westwards just above the surface of the North Sea, their slipstreams lashing the water and their pilots tensely concentrated on avoiding the single careless movement that would plunge them to destruction. For at flying speed water is as…
Give and Take in the Air
Pursuing their pre-war policies of attempting to subjugate an enemy through bombing, the British and Americans were by 1942 in possession of a rapidly- expanding fleet of several makes of four-engine bombers capable of carrying, in the case of the British Lancaster B1 for example, 12 000 lb a distance…
Bell V-247 Vigilant Unmanned Tiltrotor
The US military is showing increased interest in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned air vehicles (UAV), going beyond current helicopter-derived UAVs such as the Northrop MQ-8 Fire Scouts ordered by the US Navy. The most dramatic innovation to date is the Bell 247 Vigilant UAV, first announced on September…