Aircraft
ROMANIAN AIR SERVICE WWII Part II
A far more apparent, if distant, threat had suggested itself on May 8, 1943, when the Anglo-Americans conquered North Africa, thereby putting the Balkans within striking range of enemy bombers. Less than a month later, the Corpul1 Aerian Roman was officially activated during an impressive and popularly acclaimed parade of its crews through Kirovograd before Marshal Antonescu. The first day…
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Blohm & Voss BV P 81, P 84, P 85 AND PÂ 86
The first BV 138 A-0s were completed in January 1939 but bad weather and other problems meant that test flying could only commence in June and “unfortunately, the results did not meet expectations. Blohm & Voss also had to make several changes to this aircraft before it could be flown…
Red Hats – MiG-23Flogger
“Red 49” MiG-23 on the Tonopah ramp, 1988. CONSTANT PEG PROGRAM MiG-23 FLOGGER FIGHTER JET Cairo had recently fallen out with Moscow with predictable results: less than one year after it started flying the Russian-supplied MiG-23 “Flogger” – a new and somewhat enigmatic supersonic interceptor that was greatly revered by…
Fokker Fodder
In the summer of 1915, the solution to effectively arming an aeroplane was finally found in the invention of a device that would prevent the gun firing whenever a propeller blade was in a bullet’s path. This, it was realised, could be achieved by fitting a cam to the propeller…
Sopwith Salamander
EXPERIMENTS IN CAMOUFLAGE The losses of Cambrai in 1917 didn’t just teach the British about the need for armour when flying low over the enemy – they highlighted the need for protection from enemies flying above too. British fighters tasked with daytime missions had, up to that point, generally been…
Lisunov Li-2
4,937 Russian Li-2s were manufactured from the Douglas plan. The PS-84 had flown with Aeroflot primarily as a passenger transport before World War II. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 many of the PS-84s were taken into military use and redesignated the Lisunov Li-2 in 1942. The military…
Norden Bombsight
“It is not very difficult to hit a target from an altitude of 30,000 feet.” Theodore H. Barth, Norden Bombsight Co. Great advances are seldom the products of a single mind; rather they arise from lore and facts previously known. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper in the seventeenth century…