The aircraft took off from Ada Regional Airport (KADH) in Oklahoma and flew over Lake Atoka during the 60-minute flight. According to GAMI, the warbird’s 2,000 hp Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine is the most powerful to fly on the G100UL fuel.

• READ MORE: GAMI Responds to Cirrus G100UL Service Advisory

“This big-bore radial engine operating at up to 48-inch MP demonstrates the excellent high-octane performance of the G100UL high octane unleaded avgas,” GAMI said in a statement. “The ability to successfully operate this engine as such on an unleaded fuel supports the continued operation of these and many other warbirds well into the future.”

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.

The post GAMI’s G100UL Unleaded Fuel Successfully Powers Historic WWII Aircraft appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Retired Royal Air Force (RAF) group captain John Allman “Paddy” Hemingway was born in Ireland in 1919. In summer 1940, Hemingway turned 21 while flying Hawker Hurricanes with the RAF’s No. 85 Squadron, led by then squadron commander Peter Townsend.

Townsend was later to earn arguably greater fame for his romantic involvement with Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II.

Hemingway and the No. 85 Squadron were based at RAF Debden (later home of the U.S. Army Air Forces 4th Fighter Group) and then RAF Croyden during the storied Battle of Britain, in which the badly outnumbered RAF Fighter Command defeated the previously unbeaten German Luftwaffe. The setback caused Adolf Hitler to reverse course eastward and attack Russia, turning the tide of World War II.

• READ MORE: Top 100 Warbirds

Though Hemingway was already flying in combat well before the official start of the Battle of Britain and destroyed a Heinkel He 111 on May 10, 1940, and a Dornier Do 17 the next day, he never achieved ace status (five enemy aircraft destroyed). But because of “the luck of the Irish,” he said he survived being shot down twice during the battle and twice more during combat in North Africa and Italy.

He served as an air controller during the Normandy invasion and was temporarily made squadron leader. Following V-E Day, he was appointed commander of RAF No. 43 Squadron and became a wing commander. He was later appointed station commander at RAF Leconfield.

Hemingway served as a NATO staff officer in France, ultimately achieving the honorary rank of group captain upon retirement in 1969.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.

The post Last Known Battle of Britain Pilot Turns 105 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Born in 1882, Geoffrey de Havilland was the second son of a village pastor. At an early age, he displayed a mechanical interest and pursued a career as an automotive engineer, building cars and motorcycles. Frustrated at work, in 1909 he received a gift of 1,000 pounds from his grandfather to build his first airplane, just a few years after the Wright brothers had made their first flight.

By World War I, de Havilland was working for Airco, where he designed a number of early warplanes, which enjoyed varying success, and flew as his own test pilot. In 1920, with the support of his former boss, de Havilland set up his own independent company and embarked on a series of aircraft named after moths, inspired by his love of lepidopterology, or the study of butterflies and moths.

• READ MORE: Reaching Uncharted Corners of the Globe in a Fokker F.VII

In 1932, he introduced the DH.82 Tiger Moth, a variant of earlier aircraft designed specifically as a military trainer for the Royal Air Force (RAF), as well as other air forces. Like many aircraft at the time, the Tiger Moth’s fuselage is constructed of fabric-covered steel tubing, while its wings are made of fabric-covered wooden frames. I’ve seen a single person lift a Tiger Moth by the tail to take it out of its hangar. The Tiger Moth was powered by a de Havilland Gypsy air-cooled, 4-cylinder in-line engine which produced 120-130 hp, depending on the version.

Like most trainers, the Tiger Moth had two seats, each with its own set of controls, with the student in front and the instructor or solo pilot in back. One of the major changes introduced to the Tiger Moth, at RAF insistence, was folding door panels that made it easier to enter and exit both cockpits. The feature was absolutely essential when a student or instructor needed to quickly bail out wearing  heavy parachutes.

The silver knobs on the left control throttle, fuel mixture, and aileron trim. The knob on the right enables “auto slots,” slats on the wings that automatically deploy like flaps to provide additional lift at low speeds and high angles of attack. Notice that there is no artificial horizon. However, there is a turn indicator (in the center) as well as a red column that indicates the aircraft’s pitch. It is currently showing nose-up because the plane is resting on its tailwheel.

The compass, situated just in front of the stick, is a bit tricky. You can either keep it pointed toward north and look to where the line is pointing, or you can rotate the compass ring to show the current heading at the top and follow that by keeping it centered.

• READ MORE: Reenacting Bombing Missions in an F-117 Nighthawk

In addition to the cockpit gauge, there’s also a mechanical airspeed indicator on the left wing. Red shows typical stall speed range (below 45 mph).

I’m at England’s Upavon Airfield, a few miles north of Stonehenge, which was home to the RAF’s Central Flying School, founded in 1912, and where the first Tiger Moths were delivered. It is now a small army base (hence the vehicles) and is also used as a glider field. With no electrical starter, the Tiger Moth is hand-propped to get it started. The turning of the propeller, by hand, engages the magnetos that send charges to the spark plugs, starting the engine.

This particular Tiger Moth, N-6635, is based on the one on display at the Imperial War Museum at RAF Duxford, near Cambridge. It’s actually a composite that was put together with parts from different Tiger Moths.

The engine is modeled realistically. If you overstress it on full throttle for more than a few minutes, it will overheat and conk out. If you let it idle for too long, the spark plugs will foul up. With a small engine like this, the left-turning tendencies are not pronounced. However, the trickiest part of takeoff for most tailwheel airplanes is still when the tail comes up. The descent of the rotating propeller causes a gyroscopic precession to the left.

The Tiger Moth gained immediate popularity as the RAF’s primary trainer—the first airplane a would-be pilot learned to fly after ground school before moving on to more advanced fighters or bombers. It gained a reputation for being “easy to fly, but difficult to master.” In normal flight, it was forgiving of mistakes. On the other hand, the Tiger Moth required great precision from a pilot to learn aerobatic combat maneuvers, without going into a spin. However, it recovers easily from spins, which meant it highlighted a student’s shortcomings without (usually) putting them at fatal risk. Though I did notice that when flying upside down (or going through a roll), the engine sputters, probably because gravity messes with the fuel flow.

During the 1930s, between world wars, students selected by the RAF took about nine to 12 months to earn their pilot wings, building up about 150 hours of flight time, about 55 with an instructor and the rest solo. Their instruction included night, formation, and instrument flying, along with gunnery and aerobatics (for combat).

The Tiger Moth was sold to 25 air forces from different countries and proved popular to private buyers as well. It was a big commercial success for the company. A total of 1,424 Tiger Moths were produced prior to the outbreak of WWII, most of which were manufactured at the de Havilland factory in Hatfield, north of London.

Slowing down while descending to land can be difficult. I found I usually needed to cut the power to idle and glide in. Power-off landings were a very typical method in that era. It’s nearly impossible to see forward in the Tiger Moth, especially when landing. It’s best to lean your head out the side, while keeping one eye on controlling the airspeed at around 60 mph (about 15-20 mph above stalling).

• READ MORE: Exploring the Checkered History of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

There are also no wheel brakes. So once you do land, you just have to let friction slow you down. It’s easier in a grassy field like this.

The success of the Tiger Moth led to Geoffrey de Havilland being awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1934. But its story was only just beginning.

Welcome to Goderich Airport (CYGD) in Ontario, Canada, about 2.5 hours north of Detroit on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. In 1928, de Havilland set up a subsidiary in Canada to produce Tiger Moths to train Canadian airmen. This Tiger Moth, #8922 (registration C-GCWT), is based on a real plane that belongs to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope, Ontario, and is in airworthy condition.

With the outbreak of WWII in 1939, the British government realized that Britain itself was an unsuitable location for training large numbers of new pilots. Not only is the weather often poor, the airspace over Britain was quickly becoming a battleground between the beleaguered RAF and the German Luftwaffe—the last place you’d want a student pilot to learn how to fly.

Canada, in contrast, offered vast areas far from enemy activity, where pilot training could be conducted. To take advantage of this, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) was created to instruct thousands of airmen from Britain and across the Empire in safer locations like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and South Africa. The yellow “training” livery was typical of the BCATP, though the real-life airplane was also equipped with a plexiglass-enclosed cockpit to permit winter training.

Many of the small airports dotted across Canada from east to west—as well as some large ones—got their start as part of BCATP, commonly referred to as “the Plan.” I selected Goderich to fly from because after it was built in Canada in 1942, this plane, #8922, was used to train pilots here at the No. 12 Elementary Flying Training School (EFTS), as part of the BCATP. The same airplane later went to No. 4 EFTS at Windsor Mills, Quebec, an airfield that no longer exists.

Eventually, there were 36 elementary flight schools across Canada, in addition to dozens more devoted to training bombardiers, navigators, and gunners. At least 131,533 Allied pilots and aircrew were trained in Canada under BCATP—the largest of any country participating in the Plan—of which 72,835 were Canadian. The program cost Canada $1.6 billion but employed 104,000 Canadians in air bases across the land. De Havilland produced 1,548 Tiger Moths in Canada, by war’s end, to help stock these flight schools with aircraft.

While training pilots in Canada was safer than in Britain, lives were still lost. From 1942 to 1944, a total of 831 fatal accidents took place, an average of five per week.

• READ MORE: The Story of the Schneider Trophy and the Supermarine S.5

BCATP training was by no means limited to Canada. I’m here at Parafield Airport in Adelaide, Australia, which was home to that country’s No. 1 Elementary Flight Training School and received its first Tiger Moths in April 1940. This particular Tiger Moth, A17-58, was built by de Havilland in Australia in 1940 and apparently still continues to fly. Australia eventually had 12 elementary flight schools (plus a host of other schools) as part of BCATP, which was known there as the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS).

Prior to BCATP, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) only trained about 50 pilots per year. By 1945, more than 37,500 Australian aircrew had been trained in Australia, though many then went to Canada to complete their more advanced training before going into combat. Most Australians in the RAAF went on to fight in the Pacific Theater, though some joined the RAF to fight over Europe. De Havilland built a total of 1,070 Tiger Moths in Australia and even exported a few batches to the U.S. Army Air Forces and the Royal Indian Air Force.

The BCATP was one of the largest aviation training programs in history, providing about half of the airmen who flew for Britain and its dependencies in WWII. The ability to train in safety, away from the combat zone, gave Allied pilots a crucial advantage over the Germans, who typically went into combat with roughly half the training hours of their  counterparts. The program was so important that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who called the U.S. “the arsenal of democracy,” dubbed Canada “the aerodrome of democracy” as a result of its contribution to training Allied airmen—many of them in the Tiger Moth.

Tiger Moths were not only used to train pilots during WWII. Some were deployed for coastal patrols. I’m here at Farnborough, Britain’s former center for experimental aircraft development (southwest of London), to investigate another interesting purpose they served.

No, it’s not a mistake—there’s a reason why there are no pilots visible in either cockpit. This aircraft, LF858, was what was known as a “Queen Bee.” British anti-aircraft gun crews needed practice firing at real targets. But flying an airplane with people shooting at you is, well, rather dangerous. So de Havilland figured out a way to put radio equipment in the rear cockpit that could receive messages for an operator on the ground and work the aircraft’s controls accordingly. In other words, it was the world’s first “drone” aircraft.

Besides being able to fly by remote control, the main difference between a regular Tiger Moth and a Queen Bee is that instead of metal tubing for the fuselage frame, the latter used wood (like for its wings) to save money. The objective wasn’t to shoot down the Tiger Moth—that would be wasteful. Gunners used an offset to hopefully miss, so the airplane could land and be used again. But if they did hit, no pilots were at risk.

About 470 Tiger Moth “Queen Bees” were built during WWII. The term “drone” for a pilotless airplane derives directly from the Queen Bee program and refers to a male bee who flies just once to mate with a queen then dies.

By the end of WWII, nearly 8,700 Tiger Moths had been built, 4,200 of them for the RAF alone. It continued to be used by the RAF for training until it was replaced by the de Havilland Chipmunk in the 1950s.

The fact that so many people across the British Empire had learned to fly in a Tiger Moth made them immensely popular after the war, among private pilots and enthusiasts. An estimated 250 Tiger Moths are still flying, including this one based out of the small airstrip near Ranfurly on the southern island of New Zealand.

A number of Tiger Moth clubs exist around the world. The late Christopher Reeve, of Superman fame, once joined one of these clubs and learned how to fly the Tiger Moth. Reeve even made a movie about it, which you can find on YouTube. He said it took some time getting used to how slow they approach and land.

Tiger Moths have appeared in several films, often disguised as other biplanes. For instance, the plane in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was a Tiger Moth, decked out to look like a German Fokker. The silver biplane in The English Patient (1993) was a Tiger Moth (the other, yellow biplane in that movie was a Stearman). It’s worth mentioning that the biplane in Out of Africa (1985) was not a Tiger Moth, but the earlier and very similar Gypsy Moth, also built by de Havilland. Apparently there was even a movie in 1974 called The Sergeant and the Tiger Moth (1974) about a guy and his girlfriend who aren’t even pilots but build and fly one anyway. I have no idea if it’s any good, so please find and watch it for me.

If you’d like to see a version of this story with more historical photos and screenshots, you can check out my original post here. This story was told utilizing Ant’s Airplanes Tiger Moth add-on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, along with liveries and scenery downloaded for free from the flightsim.to community.

The post Recreating the de Havilland Tiger Moth appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The aircraft is owned by the Coulson Group in Port Alberni, British Columbia, and spent decades fighting wildfires up and down the west coast of North America. An earlier deal to send the aircraft to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, fell through but the airplane was painted in navy blue in anticipation of that move.

“We are pleased to have the Philippine Mars join our museum where we will preserve this World War II-era aircraft for decades to come,” said Scott Marchand, CEO of Pima Air and Space Museum.

• READ MORE: Inside the ‘Spruce Goose’

A sister ship, Hawaii Mars, which fought fires up until 2015, will be sent to the B.C. Aviation Museum in Sidney, B.C., near Victoria.

“As a fitting tribute to their years of service and years of hard work by many people in B.C. and the U.S., we are pleased to see both Mars aircraft landing to rest at world class institutions in 2024,” said Coulson Group CEO Wayne Coulson.

What’s not clear is how the massive flying boat will get to Tucson. It has no landing gear and operates only from water. It needs a relatively big body of water to take off and land, and there is no such open water in the immediate area of the museum.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.

The post WWII-Era ‘Philippine Mars’ Transport Seaplane Headed to Arizona Museum appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Both sides of my family can boast their fair share of those who nobly served our nation in the armed forces. My late father was extremely proud of that fact, even though he wasn’t a veteran himself. The closest he came was being a member of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University. My paternal grandfather, a Jamaican-born immigrant, served in the U.S. Army during World War I. After Pearl Harbor, my maternal grandfather ran away from an orphanage with his younger brother, lied about his age, and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater as a staff sergeant.

My dad told me that one of my cousins from my grandmother’s Colorado-rooted side of the family served as a Naval aviator aboard the USS Hornet. I also had a great uncle on my mother’s side who served in the Navy during WWII. Another uncle—like myself and my father, a proud A&M graduate—flew as a navigator on a WWII bomber and recorded more than 100 missions in Korea and Vietnam.

Given my family’s military background—which, by the way, has made holidays like Memorial Day and Veterans Day resonate more keenly in recent years—it’s no surprise my dad proudly told me about William L. Tingle, who went by Bill.

Since my father was born in 1941, he never knew his first cousin Bill, a copilot on a B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the most famous heavy bombers in history and a major factor in winning WWII. His airplane was shot down over Nazi-occupied France in 1942. Of the crew of 10, only four survived—and Tingle was not among them. I don’t recall much more than that, other than seeing his parents’ graves next to that of my father, grandparents, and my dad’s brother. I never gave him much thought when visiting the family plots at our south-side cemetery in San Antonio. That’s probably because I never realized Bill Tingle’s body, like so many who served in WWII, was never recovered from his ill-fated final mission.

• READ MORE: Remembering the Mighty Men of the 381st Bomb Group

According to Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency documentation, on October 21, 1942, First Lieutenant Tingle was aboard a B-17, the Francis X—named after the pilot, Second Lieutenant Francis X. Schwarzenbek—that took off from the British Royal Air Force Base in Polebrook, England, as one of 99 aircraft on a mission to destroy German submarine bases in Lorient, France. Only 18 of those bombers made it to the target because the rest were forced to turn back because of heavy cloud cover over the target. Tingle and Sergeant George Whitham Jr. were actually filling in for two members of Schwarzenbek’s crew.

Witnesses on the same mission said the Francis X was hit by enemy fire from a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter, fell out of formation, and went down in the Bay of Douarnenez. Four crewmembers managed to bail out and survived but were captured. The remains of the other six, including Tingle, were never located or identified because the heavy presence of German forces in the area prevented any search efforts. Postwar attempts to find the airplane’s actual crash site along its route, or any remains of the missing crewmembers, also proved unsuccessful.

I know all of this detail thanks to Nanis Gilmore.

In 2019, Gilmore, a 72-year-old retired registered nurse living in Vancouver, Washington, emailed me to ask if I was related to William L. Tingle. She informed me that her mother, the former Charlotte Elizabeth Teepell, married Bill Tingle in Tampa, Florida, in February 1942, just before he shipped out to England. Bill was killed a mere eight months later at the age of 25, leaving Charlotte a 27-year-old widow.

After Charlotte suffered a stroke in 2007, the family decided to move her to a care facility. In preparation for that, Gilmore was going through her mother’s belongings when she came across a box of love letters Charlotte received from Bill during the war. All the envelopes were addressed to Mrs. William L. Tingle, and the letters—all 71 of them—were neatly stowed away along with some other keepsakes, telegrams, and photo albums. When she was a teenager, Gilmore recalls stumbling across an 8-by-10-inch framed photo of Bill in uniform in a desk drawer and asking her mother, “Mom, who is this handsome man?”

• READ MORE: Downed WWII Lancaster Bomber Raised from Sea Floor

“[She was] fumbling a little bit [to answer] because she really hadn’t mentioned him before…[and said,] ‘Well, he was my first husband. He died in the war,’” said Gilmore, whose father, Merrill Gilmore, married Charlotte about five years after Bill’s death. “…It was hard for Mom to talk about. I think it speaks volumes that she carried that box of letters her entire life.”

It’s undoubtedly a common occurrence for those who represent what’s been aptly dubbed the “Greatest Generation.” There must have been untold instances of marriages taking place just before the soldier was called off to war.

One of the Francis X’s survivors, Sergeant Ned Herzstam, wrote a letter to George Randolph Tingle—Bill Tingle’s father and my great-great-grandfather—that Gilmore has graciously shared with me. The correspondence included a rough drawing of the B-17 crew positions aboard the aircraft.

“As you see [from the diagram], Bill had a [more] difficult escape passage than myself, [the] radio operator,” Herzstam said in his letter dated July 23, 1945. “However, the bombardier [Lieutenant Harry R.] Erickson survived and he reported that Bill was putting on his parachute, but had not started for the escape hatch at the time…Erickson bailed out. That is the only visual report there was about Bill. However, I believe I talked with him last as I was one of the last to leave the ship, and he was still there when I left. Mr. Tingle, your son was a real soldier and one of the few real officers it was a pleasure to serve [with]. I heard him talk under fire, and there was no trace of fear in his voice, always calm assurance. The last words I heard him say were, ‘We’re turning back for England.’…

“I landed about 5 miles offshore and was fortunate enough to be picked up by a French fishing boat. Of the five men that went out of my escape door, three lived [and] two drowned. By my diagram, you can see five go out the front hatch…of those five front men, only one is back home now, [Lieutenant] Erickson…and he told me he did not know if the other four ever got out of the ship. So Mr. Tingle, it is impossible to determine if Bill went down with the ship, drowned after parachuting, or was taken POW. Only one thing more, wherever he is now, rest assured you can always be proud of him. I am!”

Gilmore said Charlotte, who was living in Boston at the time of her husband’s last mission, went to live with Bill’s parents in San Antonio not long after he was declared missing in action to share in their grief.

“[My husband, Philip, and I] visited the house [at 201 Cloverleaf Avenue in March 2018] and sat outside with the current owner and chatted for quite some time,” she told me in one of the many emails we have exchanged about Bill and Charlotte’s brief life together. “He remembered the Tingles.”

Tingle’s name is enshrined on the Wall of the Missing, along with more than 5,000 MIA men and women—most of whom died in the Battle of the Atlantic or the strategic air bombardment of northwest Europe—at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in England. My father had a marker erected for Bill at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. Gilmore also shared with me the letter my father sent to her mother in 2003 to deliver that special news.

Inspired by her mother Charlotte, who died at age 94 in 2009, and Bill’s incredible love story, Gilmore visited the Cambridge memorial with her husband in 2019.

“The wall stretches a block in length,” Gilmore said. “It was, for me, overwhelming to see the names plus all the crosses in the field and to realize the enormous sacrifice made to win the war. It was an emotional experience when the superintendent of the memorial took us to where Bill’s name was on the wall and handed me an American and British flag [to take photos with].”

At Gilmore’s urging, my cousin Dr. Leslie E. Tingle, also an A&M alum and the eldest son of the decorated Air Force officer and late uncle, and I have submitted DNA samples to the Department of Defense Family Reference Database for use in the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. It’s a service the government provides so that in case any remains are ever discovered during excavations of Europe’s beaches and battlefields, Bill Tingle might be able to be identified. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, more than 72,000 service members remain unaccounted for from the WWII era.

“The journey to find Bill has been fascinating and very emotional at the same time,” Gilmore said. “I know my mom and Bill are together now, and I’d like to think that this search is somehow meaningful for them too.”

Before enlisting in 1941 and earning his wings at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Bill Tingle was “studying voice in Boston,” according to a three-paragraph article in the October 29, 1942, San Antonio Evening News with the headline: “1st Lt. W.L. Tingle Reported Missing in Action.” It was in Boston where Bill and Charlotte first met in 1941 as voice students, started dating, and fell in love.

It didn’t take me long to realize the little fact about “studying voice” near the end of the newspaper story helps to explain the closing of Herzstam’s letter to Bill’s father. It was clearly a nod to my distant cousin’s love for music and singing. In one of his final letters to Charlotte, Gilmore said he told his wife that he even led his bomber group—in need of a morale boost—in song because a scheduled vaudeville troupe was late for its performance.

“Well, I’ll end now with a thought [from a Christian Science hymnal] that proved helpful to me: ‘O’er waiting harpstrings of the mind, there sweeps a strain, low, sad, and sweet, whose measures bind the power of pain and wake a white-winged angel throng of thoughts illumined by faith and breathed in raptured song with love perfumed.’ A lot of Bill’s life was devoted to song and I’m sure he’d want you all to carry on this singing. — Respectfully, Ned.”

Respectfully, indeed. Rest in peace, Bill and Charlotte.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Plane & Pilot.

The post A War-Torn Tale of Love, Service appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Anthony Fokker was Dutch, born in the colonial East Indies. In 1910, at age 20, he moved to Germany to pursue his interest in aviation. He soon founded his own airplane company there, and during World War I it designed a number of successful and famous fighter planes for the Germans. Fokker himself was an accomplished pilot. I wrote a previous article on the Fokker Dr.I triplane, which you can check out here.

• READ MORE: Recreating the Final Flight of the Red Baron

After losing WWI, Germany had to surrender all its warplanes and aircraft factories, including Fokker’s factory, under the Treaty of Versailles. Fokker, however, was able to bribe railway and border officials to smuggle some of his equipment back to his native Netherlands. That equipment allowed him to reestablish his company in Holland and design the Fokker F.VII, a single-engine transport for the fledgling postwar civilian market. I’m in one of those models here, in KLM colors, at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport (EHAM).

The F.VII’s fuselage was fabric stretched over a steel-tube frame. Its wings were plywood-skinned. The original, single-engine version of the F.VII was powered by a variety of different models of radial engines, which ranged from 360 to 480 hp. Inside there was room for eight passengers, as well as a bathroom (the door to my right here).

The cabin was connected to the two-man cockpit by a little door under the fuel tank and starter switches. On the instrument panel, from left to right: oil pressure and temperature, altitude, another oil temperature gauge, air speed indicator (with a turn indicator below it), clock, and rpm tachometer. Around the cockpit you can see all the wires and pulleys connecting the controls to the flight surfaces outside. Turn or push the yoke and they quite clearly move. Fly by wire, indeed. The compass is basically a bowl with a magnet floating in it.

The designer of the initial F.VII was Walter Rethel, who was later hired by Willy Messerschmitt and went on to design the famous Bf 109, the main German fighter at the start of World War II.

With a single engine, even a fairly powerful one for its time, the Fokker F.VII didn’t exactly spring off the ground. It lumbers into the air and climbs gradually. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s, the F.VII became a successful early passenger transport for early airlines such as Dutch KLM and Belgian Sabena. Here I am flying over the historic center of Amsterdam.

In 1924, the F.VII even introduced flights from Amsterdam to the East Indies. Needless to say, it wasn’t nonstop and could take many days.

In 1925, automakers Henry Ford and his son Edsel began the Ford Reliability Tour, a challenge for aircraft to successfully complete a 1,900-mile course across the American Midwest with stops in 10 cities. To compete in Ford’s challenge, and make the airplane more reliable in general, Fokker had the F.VII redesigned to have three engines, adding two mounted on the side struts. The new F.VIIb/3m, decked out here in Sabena colors and flying over Brussels, became immediately popular, with 154 built. Each of the three engines was a 200 hp Wright J-4 Whirlwind.

• READ MORE: Exploring the Checkered History of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

Belgian tycoon Alfred Loewenstein, calculated to be the third-richest man in the world at his peak in the 1920s, even owned his own private Fokker F.VII. Flying over the English Channel in 1928, he had one of the most unfortunate bathroom breaks in history. You see, the door to the bathroom (left) is directly across from the door to the outside (right). It seems Loewenstein opened and walked through the wrong one and fell to his death in the water below. Though to this day, some still suspect it was murder. There’s even a book about this incident, The Man Who Fell from the Sky by William Norris.

If that were the sum of the F.VII’s history, it might be pretty uninspiring. But to tell the rest of it, I’m here at Spitsbergen in Norway’s Arctic archipelago of Svalbard for Byrd’s flight to the North Pole. Richard Byrd was a U.S. naval officer who commanded air patrols out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, during WWI. He played an active but supporting role in the first attempts to cross the Atlantic by air, and in 1926 had his big shot at fame. His Fokker F.VIIa/3m, mounted on snow skis, was named the Josephine Ford, after the daughter of Edsel Ford, who helped finance the expedition.

This was a two-man expedition, with Byrd accompanied by Navy Chief Aviation Pilot Floyd Bennett. The passenger seats were torn out and replaced with extra fuel tanks and emergency supplies.

The inside of the cockpit is quite similar to the one-engine version but with three separate throttles and tachometers (showing rpm). There was no airport in Svalbard at the time, so they had to take off from a snow-covered field—hence the skis. Byrd’s flight, from Svalbard and back, took 15 hours and 57 minutes, including 13 minutes spent circling at their farthest north point, which Byrd claimed, based on his sextant readings, to be the North Pole.

Did he really reach the North Pole and become the first to fly over it? This remains hotly disputed to this day, with some researchers claiming that he faked his sextant readings and fell short of his goal. In that case, the true prize would belong to Norwegian Roald Amundsen, already the first to reach the South Pole by land, in his airship Norge.

• READ MORE: The Story of the Schneider Trophy and the Supermarine S.5

A few observations about flying the Fokker F.VII, at least in the sim. First, it’s not very stable, in the sense of wanting to correct back to straight and level flight. It’s sensitive to being loaded either nose-heavy or tail-heavy and requires a lot of control input. Second, that big wing really likes to glide. To descend without overspeeding, I basically have to put all three throttles back to idle and glide down.

Last, there are no differential brakes and no tailwheel. That makes the F.VII extremely hard to control on the ground, even just to taxi. That’s especially true on snow skis.

Whether Byrd truly did reach the North Pole or not, he became a huge national hero when he returned to the U.S. Byrd and Bennett were both presented with the Medal of Honor by then-President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

The following year in 1927, Byrd outfitted a new Fokker F.VII/3m, named America, to bid for the Orteig Prize, promising $25,000 for the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris (or vice versa). Anthony Fokker himself had recently moved to the United States and was part of the team preparing Byrd and his crew—the odds-on favorite—for the Atlantic crossing. During practices, however, America—piloted by Fokker himself—crashed, injuring both Byrd and Bennett and postponing their attempt. As a result, while America was being repaired, Charles Lindbergh—an unheard-of underdog—made the flight solo in the Spirit of St. Louis, becoming an aviation legend.

• READ MORE: Simulating a Bombing Raid in an F-16

The Fokker F.VII would still achieve fame, though, crossing a different ocean at the hands of Australian pilot Charles Kingsford Smith in 1928. If you’ve ever passed through Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport (YSSY) and wondered who it’s named after, you’re about to find out. (If you’re an Australian, you already know).

Movie star handsome Smith, known as “Smithy,” fought as a combat engineer at Gallipoli in WWI but soon joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot. He was shot down, injured, and returned to become a flying instructor in Australia. From that day, Smith had a dream to cross the Pacific Ocean by air from the U.S. to Australia. By 1928 he was ready to try to achieve that goal. That’s why I’m here at Oakland Municipal Airport (KOAK) in California, where he took off in his Fokker F.VIIb/3m Southern Cross. Not unlike Byrd’s airplane, the inside has been altered to make space for extra fuel tanks.

At 8:54 a.m. on May 31, 1928, Smith and his four-man crew lifted off from Oakland on the first leg of their journey to Hawaii. At the time, flying to Hawaii, much less Australia, was an extremely daunting prospect. While they had a radio with limited range, there were no radio beacons to guide them. They could only estimate a course based on the latest, often inaccurate, weather reports over the Pacific and hope that unexpected winds wouldn’t blow them off course and make them miss Hawaii entirely. As they flew over the Golden Gate— the bridge hadn’t been built yet—they knew that several aviators before them had estimated wrong and simply vanished into the vastness of the Pacific.

The first stage from Oakland to Hawaii covered 2,400 miles and took 27 hours and 25 minutes (87.54 mph). It was uneventful. But one can only imagine their joy as they arrived here over the northeast shore of Oahu.

They landed at Wheeler Army Airfield in the center of Oahu. The Southern Cross was the first foreign-registered airplane to arrive in Hawaii and was greeted at Wheeler by thousands, including Governor Wallace Rider Farrington. Smith and his crew were put up at Honolulu’s pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel to rest for the next stage.

• READ MORE: A Virtual History of the Piper Cub

The runway at Wheeler was too short for the Southern Cross to take off fully loaded, so they flew to Barking Sands on the west coast of Kauai, where a special runway had been constructed. They took off from Barking Sands at 5:20 a.m. on June 3, bound for Suva in Fiji.

The journey from Hawaii to Fiji was 3,155 miles—the longest flight yet over continuous seas. It lasted 34 hours and 30 minutes at an average speed of 91.45 mph.

Halfway across near the equator, the Southern Cross encountered a tropical thunderstorm. Keep in mind, the crew did not have the benefit of an artificial horizon. The only way it could keep level, flying blind, was keeping a close eye on airspeed, altitude, and the inclinometer (or turn indicator). Somehow, the crew weathered the storm and kept going.

The crew undoubtedly felt great relief when it spotted the green landscape of Fiji ahead. There was no airport at that time, so the Southern Cross landed on a cricket field. Once again, it was far too small to use to take off again, so after a few days’ rest, the crew relocated to a beach from which to depart for the next and final leg of the journey. Leaving Fiji on June 9, the aviators embarked on their final 1,683-mile stretch home to Australia.

Once more they encountered storms, which blew them nearly 150 miles off course. Even when the weather was clear, the unrelenting and trackless ocean must have been overwhelming.

The Southern Cross reached the Australian coastline near Ballina, well south of its intended target, and turned north toward Brisbane. As the crew reached Brisbane, it was greeted by an aerial escort. The goal was Eagle Farm Airport northeast of the city—now the location of Brisbane’s main international airport.

The Southern Cross had flown 7,187 miles (11,566 kilometers) in 83 hours and 72 minutes. The Pacific Ocean had been conquered by the air for the very first time. A crowd of 26,000 greeted Smith and his crew when they touched down at Eagle Farm.

Smith died in 1935 at 35 when his airplane disappeared over the Indian Ocean while attempting to break the England-Australia speed record. His career was filled with both triumph and scandal, but he is still considered Australia’s great aviation hero. If you visit Brisbane’s airport, you can still see the real Southern Cross on display in a dedicated hangar.

The Fokker F.VII continued as a popular airliner into the 1930s. However, the vulnerability of its fabric-and-wood construction became apparent following a 1931 TWA crash that resulted in the death of famed University of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. As a result, the Fokker F.VII gave way to all-metal airliners such as the Boeing 247, Lockheed L-10 Electra, and eventually the DC-3.

One of the most popular early successors to the Fokker F.VII was the Ford Trimotor, basically an all-metal version of the F.VII. For all their sponsorship, the Fords seem to have gotten something out of it in the end. Anthony Fokker, nicknamed “The Flying Dutchman,” lived most of the rest of his life in the U.S. and died at  49 in New York in 1939 from pneumococcal meningitis.  

If you’d like to see a version of this story with more historical photos and screenshots, you can check out my original post here. This story was told utilizing the “Local Legend” Fokker F.VII add-on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, along with liveries and scenery downloaded for free from the flightsim.to community.

The post Reaching Uncharted Corners of the Globe in a Fokker F.VII appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

For history and aviation buffs, this is must-see programming. The series, based on the 2007 book of the same name by Donald L. Miller, chronicles the experiences of the 100th Bomb Group, part of the Eighth Air Force in England during the war. For those who swoon at the sight and sound of a Boeing B-17, this is something you will want to watch. Several times.

The series is touted as a companion piece to HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific. All three of these gritty war dramas were produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

The miniseries was several years in discussion, and when the green light was given, there was no shortage of aviation and WWII historians who wanted to be part of the project. One of those was Taigh Ramey, well known in the American warbird circuit for his Twin Beech restoration, maintenance facility, and role at the Stockton Field Aviation Museum and WWII Bomber Camp in California.

Ramey’s mother was an Army nurse in WWII, and his father a navigator aboard a B-29. As a child, he built model aircraft with his dad and collected aircraft instruments. One year for Christmas, Ramey received a Crocker-Wheeler A-8 gun turret.

“It was new in the original crate from 1943,” Ramey said. “The like-new Plexiglas dome had a protective cover over it that was stenciled ‘TRAINING TURRET TYPE A-8 FOR MODEL AT-11 AIRCRAFT.’ It was so cool, and I asked my dad what an AT-11 was. He showed me a photo and said that he and a buddy took an AT-11 out of Saipan in 1945 and buzzed the Japanese in the control tower on the island of Rota, making them jump out! Combat use of an AT-11!”

The AT-11 is a military variant of the Twin Beech, and Ramey became familiar with the civilian aircraft while studying aeronautics at San Jose State University. He discovered a patch-and-rivet pattern on one of the aircraft in the school program that indicated it had been used by the military as a bombardier trainer. That fueled his desire to get an AT-11 of his own. He learned SJSU was planning to discard the aircraft, and if he wanted it as a project, it would cost $250 for the airframe—engines not included. He borrowed the money from his mother and became the proud owner of a 1943 Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan bombardier trainer.

Fast-forward a few decades. Ramey, now a 5,000-hour commercial pilot with multiengine, CFI, MEI, and A&P/IA certificates,  learns the Masters of the Air project is moving forward—and knew he wanted to be part of it.

“I emailed as many folks as possible to try and get involved,” he said. “I am sure about 10,000 others did as well. It turned out that it was Bomber Camp that got me the job.”

The idea for Bomber Camp started as a paper Ramey wrote in college. It has since evolved into an educational camp for adults where they learn all about WWII air and ground crew by living the experience. They dress in WWII-authentic clothing and learn about the jobs of the men during the war. They have the opportunity to fly on a B-17G for a simulated mission with dummy bombs.

“The students get to shoot the 50-cal machine gun and get to drop bombs with the famous Norden bombsight,” Ramey said. “You can even ride in a ball turret in flight and all of the other crew positions in the B-17.”

People who knew about Bomber Camp suggested Ramey to the movie’s production staff as a technical adviser on the series, and soon he received a call asking if he would like to come out for two weeks to train pilots to act like they could fly a B-17.

Although he does not have a type rating in a B-17, Ramey does have type ratings in other WWII aircraft and had flown right seat in the Collings Foundation’s 909.

A week later Ramey was in the U.K. as a WWII aviation adviser/B-17 technical adviser on the project. His job was to work with the actors portraying the flight crews as well as assisting the production department to make sure the on-screen action appeared authentic. For example, he made sure the actors were looking at the correct gauges on the instrument panel at a specific moment, such as when an engine is damaged in flight and they commented on a loss of power.

“After the two weeks were up, I was packing to go home and I talked to production about my upcoming flight,” Ramey said. “They said, ‘Oh, didn’t they tell you? You are staying for the filming.’ Uh, no. Nobody asked me if I could stay. Of course, I stayed and I was there for the full nine months of filming.”

Ramey’s work on the Masters of the Air project broadened. He went to the National Archives and Records Administration to research each mission to gain a better understanding of what it took to make it happen, then worked with Meghan Jones in the graphics department on the flight planning. The maps and plotting of courses shown in the movie are correct, he said.

“The production staff were so determined to make this as accurate as possible,” Ramey said. “The amount of effort that went into this series is beyond amazing.”

He was also tasked with teaching the actors how to handle the aircraft controls as if they were actually flying.

“I assumed that some of the actors would have a basic understanding of flying, maybe through flight simulators, gaming, or something,” Ramey said. “Not a single one had any prior experience. So I sat them down in a chair and had them hold a control wheel and make a turn with their hands and feet, telling them the basics of how the controls work. [How] to turn, roll in the rudder and aileron, and then add some back pressure. They needed to know…you can’t just hold the wheel over the full time like in your car, but you [have] to center the controls.”

No real B-17s were used in the filming, according to Ramey. Instead, two full-sized B-17 replicas were constructed, one of which was able to move with large electric motors on each main landing gear.

Ramey instructed the actors about how to handle the throttles and other controls, where to look when flying formation, and how the crew interacts in flight, such as teaching the copilot how to back up the pilot and how the flight engineer/top turret gunner stood between the pilots on takeoff.

“[I also taught the gunners] how to work the Browning M2 50 cal and how to track the fighters and how long the burst of fire would typically be,” he said. “The bombardier needed to learn how to manipulate the awkward controls of the Norden bombsight in an accurate manner to manipulate his bomb bay door and bomb release controls and to interact with the pilot on the bomb run.”

Briton David Littleton  also served as a technical adviser. Littleton had worked as an adviser and on the aircrew for the 1990 film Memphis Belle.

“I was on the flight crew for the B-17 Sally B and was tasked with firing the guns during filming from Duxford and later at Binbrook,” Littleton said.

He also worked on 2012’s Red Tails, directed by George Lucas, employed by the art department to oversee the build and kitting out of the B-17 section that was made. Littleton has a B-17 cockpit that was used for the close-up shots. On Masters of the Air the production manager contacted him about coming to see his B-17. According to Littleton, the producers used his cockpit as a template to construct sets for filming.

“My cockpit was shipped to Longcross Studios as a reference to the team to build the B-17,” he said. “I supplied many parts for the team to model and make replicas. The interior sets were visually complete from the nose to the tail for filming. These were started a year before filming commenced.”

Littleton said he also provided smaller items, such as machine gun mounts that were reproduced by the props department. His cockpit was used to train the pilots, copilots, and flight engineers.

“Myself and Taigh Ramey worked with Captain Dale Dye to assist with the extras and other actors for other crew roles,” Littleton said. “We were on hand to assist the directors on various B-17 scenes that were to be filmed.”

If you have been inside a B-17, you know how cramped it is. This was noted during the filming, as the crew were aboard B-17F, where the waist gunner windows are located directly across from each other. During combat the gunners would often slam into each other. Later-model B-17s staggered the gunners’ positions so this didn’t happen.

The combat scenes for Masters of the Air were handled using CGI. Based on recorded accounts of those who were there, the images are historically authentic. You can’t help but flinch when the German fighters come at the aircraft and parts of it are blown inward from antiaircraft gun flak.

The detail inside the bomber is impressive. You see all the headset and microphone cords, the piles of bullet casings on the floor, and the oxygen hoses and electrical cords for the heated flying suits hanging from a bulkhead or sheared off by flak. Add to this the physiological challenge of being at 20,000 feet, where the temperature is 40 below zero. There are several scenes where the airmen experience frostbite because of the below-freezing temperatures at altitude and hypoxia when their oxygen masks are knocked loose by flak or the hoses torn.

There is a gritty reality to this series that has not appeared in others. Littleton notes he has heard from a few veterans that watching Masters of the Air is a very emotional experience for them.

Like Ramey, Littleton was impressed by the production department’s attention to detail right down to the sounds of the B-17 starting up with the hydraulic pumps to the tiny details of life in the 1940s.

“The production team [was] very good to understand what was required, and a lot of research was carried out,” said Littleton, noting that the sets built at Abingdon Airfield and Mapledurham, and Chalfont Saint Giles were extremely detailed. “Everyone wanted to make sure everything was as correct as it could be. There was so much that was reproduced to make sure it was period correct that a lot was not even seen on the screen, even down to boxes of period matches and chewing gum.”

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down production. Masks were worn, and if someone on the movie crew tested positive for the virus, filming ground to a halt. This added several weeks to the production schedule.

Both Ramey and Littleton hope the viewers of Masters of the Air will gain perspective on the experiences of the airmen and how it shaped their lives after the war.

For example, a friend of mine’s father was a waist gunner on a B-17 shot down in 1944. He was 19 years old at the time. He bailed out and survived, was taken prisoner, and placed in Stalag Luft III—three days after the so-called “Great Escape,” where 76 allied airmen broke out using a tunnel. The Germans were embarrassed by the escape, and the men left in the camp paid the price. He survived the war and was repatriated, but as a result of his experiences, he would become very agitated when there was a power outage, especially in the winter. The family took care to have extra food and an emergency heat source in the house.

What makes Masters of the Air even more poignant is that the generation that fought in WWII has all but disappeared—and most took their stories with them. It’s only years later that their children and grandchildren or someone at a flea market finds their diaries or letters home.

While the rivet counters may find fault in some aspects of Masters of the Air, it still provides a window into that global conflict and a reminder of those who served.

New episodes of Masters of the Air are released on Fridays on Apple TV.

Longtime Passion for WWII Period Evident in Steven Spielberg

Masters of the Air director Steven Spielberg’s father served on a B-25 during World War II, and he has always had a fascination for the period.

For the true Spielberg fans out there, you may recall his 1980s TV science fiction anthology series Amazing Stories that featured an episode called “The Mission,” where the ball turret gunner of the B-17 Friendly Persuasion is trapped in his compartment when a German fighter collides with the aircraft. In addition, the B-17’s landing gear fails. The crew realizes they will be doing a belly landing and the ball turret – and the man inside – will be crushed.

The ball turret gunner is an aspiring cartoonist. He draws under pressure, and when he realizes the magnitude of his situation, he draws a cartoon of a B-17 with balloon tires—and they magically come to be. This was made possible by using the same production techniques for the 1988 feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The cartoon tires remain in place while the turret gunner is rescued. He is in a daze, and when he comes out of it, the tires disappear.

The post ‘Masters of the Air’ Miniseries Is Must-See TV for Aviation Buffs appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I can honestly say our stories captured millions of reads from pilots and aviation enthusiasts over the last 12 months, both for our digital-only news and enterprise reporting, as well as the print features we brought online to share with the world.

Being the stickler for detail I am, I waited til the last second ticked over on the year before diving in to see what scored highest—and here are my select 7 of those stories and why I found them compelling.

Boeing Bird of Prey Shrouded in Secrecy Still

Jason McDowell, a mild-mannered private pilot from the Midwest, consistently entertains and intrigues with both his New Owner online column, Air Compare features in print, and this series on History’s Unique Aircraft. A jet named after a Klingon spacecraft from Star Trek and given the designation “YF-118G”, Boeing’s Bird of Prey incorporated dramatic design inside and out. Why is it still a mystery? It has less to do with Boeing—and more so with the giant aerospace OEM it acquired in the 90s, McDonnell-Douglas. 

Downed WWII Lancaster Bomber Raised from Sea Floor

Our readers love their warbirds—and they clearly love a good rescue story. Who doesn’t? Especially when the survivor in question is a rare Avro Lancaster Ed603—the heavy bomber the Brits used to defend their shores and stop Hitler in World War II. Eight decades later, the airplane’s remains and those of several crewmembers have been recovered in a poignant story by Kimberly Johnson that clearly struck a chord with readers.

Why Jet It Failed

From our unique position as the world’s largest aviation media organization—a title we took in 2023 with several key acquisitions—we have an insider’s look at much of industry. And sometimes that goes a step further, because we are deeply involved in flying and operating aircraft ourselves. When fractional operator Jet It collapsed in May, FLYING Media Group owner Craig Fuller brought his behind the scenes look at the cause of the collapse to FLYING’s readers as one of the HondaJet share owners affected by the fractional’s failure.

Collings Foundation Grounds Air Tour for WWII Aircraft

More living history made our headlines—with repercussions following the horrific accident taking B-17 Flying Fortress Nine-Oh-Nine on October 2, 2022. Technical editor Meg Godlewski went in depth when the Collings Foundation took the needed step to reduce its exposure to risk by halting its famous Wings of Freedom tours of WWII aircraft and other flying legends. Instead, it has adapted its mission to bring the aircraft to a wider range of school groups with more robust education and preservation.

NTSB Releases Fiery HondaJet Runway Excursion Details

Unfortunately, many of you seek FLYINGmag.com for its reporting on accidents—looking to learn beyond the reports of the National Transportation Safety Board and understand why they occurred. Our goal? To help you mitigate the causes of these occurrences in your own flying. While several high-profile events captured our readers’ attention—and continue to do so in Peter Garrison’s Aftermath analysis as well—runway excursions by business jets remain a stubborn accident profile that the industry seeks to reduce.

A Yak 18T’s Escape from Ukraine

An exclusive feature from our print edition also racked up significant views in just the few weeks since it debuted online—FLYING contributor Jay Selman revealed the inspiring story of a special Yak 18T and the complex maneuvering  to bring it out of Ukraine and into flying status in the U.S. Both restoration and rescue mission, this article drew a lot of attention—as do many of our aircraft features, including We Fly reports on new aircraft, and Restoration Nation features on bringing historic airplanes back to life.

SpaceX Starship Grounded Indefinitely by the FAA

And the top story—in terms of total time viewers spent reading it? Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship has clearly caught our imagination in its democratization of space. Jack Daleo’s reporting on the subject drew folks to our site (thank you) and kept them reading all year long. We’re fascinated by space—and the dawn of a new era of exploration is upon us that more regular people will be able to take part in. 

That’s just one reason why I’m excited to see what 2024 brings us, in terms of stories.

And for me? I vow to #flymorein24! See you in the skies.

The post My Top <i>FLYING</i> Stories for 2023 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was June 9, 1944, only three days after the greatest seaborne invasion in history, and Allied troops clung to a perilously slender strip of French coastline after failing to achieve the bulk of their D-Day objectives. Fighting for their lives against a tenacious and skilled enemy that was beginning to flow into Normandy, the Allied armies were depending on air superiority to slow the stream of German reinforcements. That night, as one of five RAF heavy bombing missions against French rail centers, 108 Lancasters were scheduled to attack the railyard at Étampes, south of Paris. Six aircraft would not return. If their crews didn’t have any particular sense of impending doom, if a milk run to northern France seemed preferable to interminable hellish hours over the heart of Germany, they nevertheless set out across the English Channel with eyes wide open. In five years of war, Bomber Command had absorbed staggering losses of airplanes and men, and Squadron No. 49 had few “old hands” left from the early days.

Seventy-nine years later, I happened upon the grave of Bell and four of his crew on a sunny spring afternoon. Set on the modern edge of an ancient Norman town, Bayeux War Cemetery isn’t as pastoral or as beautifully sited as the other Commonwealth, American, or even German cemeteries, but, shaded by blooming chestnut trees and neatly tended with a variety of plants and flowers, it very much has the atmosphere of an English public garden. White marble gravestones evenly spaced in neat rows contain regimental insignia, crosses, crescents, and Stars of David, as well as personal inscriptions from family members.

Amid the geometric perfection, there are several headstones that stick out for being immediately adjacent, with multiple names inscribed. These are all aircrew, and Lancaster ND533 has the greatest number buried together. Flying Officer Bryan E. Bell is joined in death by air gunner F/O Hilary D. Clark, 28; wireless operator/gunner Sgt. John Holden, 21; navigator F/O Duncan MacFadyen, 28, of the Royal Australian Air Force; and air gunner Sergeant Joseph J. Reed, 23. I wondered what happened to the two others and snapped a photo for research.

I had to come to Normandy to tour the landing beaches and battlefields with my father, three brothers, and history aficionado Uncle Mickey. We had enough time to explore many of the sites of lesser-known actions, such as La Fière Bridge, Le Mesnil-Patry, Villers-Bocage, and Hill 112. A lot of the focus on “Operation Overlord” is centered on the landing beaches—bloody Omaha above all—but even there fewer than 1,000 men lost their lives against some 40,000 Americans, British, and Canadians in the furious 10-week Battle of Normandy that followed. When you visit the area, much of it surprisingly little changed since 1944, you understand why. It is a close terrain of hills, vales, and dense hedgerows that strongly favors defense. The Germans made the most of it, fighting skillfully and bravely—fanatically in the case of the Waffen-SS—despite being greatly outnumbered and underestimated by the Allies as “boys and old men.”

The Germans were also aided by technically superior equipment, particularly the Panther and Tiger tanks that took a fearsome toll on the Allies’ relatively light Shermans, Cromwells, and Churchills. This advantage was greatly blunted by the combination of Allied air superiority and Adolf Hitler’s military ineptitude and insistence on total control. The Allies had successfully duped Hitler into thinking Normandy was a feint—that the main invasion would come across the Pas-de-Calais—and he refused to release many of the Panzer divisions that would have posed a major threat to the operation. When they were shifted southwest, slowly and piecemeal, the Allies’ destruction of the French rail network forced the German reinforcements onto the roads, where they were hounded endlessly by the P-47s and P-38s of the U.S. 9th Tactical Air Command and the Hawker Typhoons of the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force. This strategy—the “Transportation Plan”—was what brought Lancaster ND533 to the rail yard at Étampes on the night of June 9 to 10.

This attack was a minor footnote in the annals of Bomber Command, which by this time was regularly mounting night attacks of 500 to 1,000 aircraft deep into Germany. The surviving records indicate the bomber stream formed and crossed into France over Dieppe at 11:15 p.m., and opposition on the inbound leg was light. The preceding de Havilland Mosquito path-finders successfully located and marked the target, and the bombing run commenced. The initial wave of bombers were on target, but then the bomb line started to wander, resulting in the destruction of some 400 civilian homes. Lancasters orbited while the “Master of Ceremonies” sorted things out, and German defenses were fully alerted by the time ND533 turned for home just after midnight. Awaiting in the darkness was the Ju-88R piloted by Hauptmann (Captain) Heinz-Horst Hißbach of Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 (2nd Night Fighter Wing). The night fighters and the flak of the Germans’ formidable FLAK-36 88 mm anti-aircraft cannon were the twin scourges of Bomber Command, and together with a third enemy, the weather, ensured a staggering 44 percent of RAF bomber crews from 1939-1945 lost their lives in the fight. Hißbach was a skilled pilot who would go on to command NJG 2 and amass 30 claimed kills before being killed himself in the final month of the war while strafing an Allied column. His fighter was equipped with a FuG-202 Lichtenstein UHF radar set, so it is likely that the crew of ND533 had no idea he was there until it was too late. At 12:38 a.m., Hißbach attacked the Lancaster with cannon fire, and it was shortly thereafter seen dropping out of the bomber stream in flames. Several villagers in the vicinity of Rosay-sur-Lieure were awake and observed the Lancaster crashing 2 kilometers north of town. They arrived the next morning, sifted through the wreckage, and collected six bodies for burial. Five of these were eventually exhumed and transferred to Bayeux War Cemetery; the sixth, flight engineer Sergeant Sidney C. Holmes, 28, is buried in nearby Marissel French National Cemetery.

The fate of the seventh crew member is interesting and quite sad. Bomb aimer F/O Philip D. Hemmens of Essex, 21, successfully bailed out of ND533 before it crashed. This was much rarer in Lancasters than other types because of the small size and placement of the escape hatch. Hemmens was sheltered by a local member of the French resistance, Huguette Verhague, along with four other airmen but was betrayed by a German collaborator and handed over to the Gestapo in Paris on August 9, only two weeks before liberation. With the collapse of the German front, 168 Allied airmen, including Hemmens, were shipped east to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp on August 15 through 20. For two months they experienced a small sample of the horrors the Nazi regime was inflicting on Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, political prisoners, and other “undesirables.” Eventually, the airmen were transferred to a regular POW camp, but it came too late for Hemmens. He died on September 27 owing to medical neglect after seven days of rheumatic fever and sepsis stemming from injuries sustained during the bailout. His remains were never recovered.

• READ MORE: Downed WWII Lancaster Bomber Raised from Sea Floor

Having learned something about the crew of ND533, I decided to find the crash site and was able to do so the morning before I flew back to the States. It rests just inside a small wood surrounded by rolling farmland, a few kilometers west of the picturesque half-timbered village of Lyons-la-Forêt. A short path leads to a granite plaque with a French inscription erected in 2010 to replace the simple wooden cross the villagers had placed on the site in 1944. Two of the Merlin engines were also excavated—their craters are still visible. This is a peaceful, shaded place filled with birdsong. After a week spent visiting places where men fought, suffered, and died in the struggle to free Europe from the grip of fascism—and where even more died in the service of the Nazi regime—this is a place for quiet reflection.

We are nearing 80 years since the end of the cataclysm of World War II, and only a handful of those veterans are still with us. I fear the conflict—and its sources and lasting repercussions—is becoming increasingly abstract, something that happened long ago to grainy people in black-and-white films. As a pilot, pondering the fate of individuals like Bryan Bell and the young airmen of ND533 helps make the cost of WWII relatable. The war in Ukraine shows that propaganda, dictatorship, and aggressive militarism remain a threat even today. Many recent events demonstrate the renewed temptations of political extremism, intolerance, and demonization of “the other.” In such times, it is important to remember the high price paid by so many the last time such feverish currents ran rampant, and for each of us to vow to do whatever we can to prevent their reoccurrence.

This article first appeared in the August 2023/Issue 940 print edition of FLYING.

The post Mission to Étampes appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

A series of testing is underway at the McKinley Climatic Lab at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, to verify T-7A system functionality during periods of extreme temperatures. During the tests, performance of the T-7’s propulsion, hydraulic, fuel, electrical, secondary power, and overall operations will be evaluated in conditions ranging from minus-25 degrees to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

• READ MORE: First Air Force Pilot Flies T-7A Red Hawk

The Red Hawk is set to replace the 1960s-era T-38 trainer for Air Force fighter and bomber pilot flight training. Its iconic red-tail livery honors the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ first Black aviation unit. 

Last month, the advanced trainer made its first cross-country flight to Edwards Air Force Base in California for flight testing.

• READ MORE: Air Force’s T-7A Trainer to Begin Next Phase of Flight Testing

“The Red Hawk must withstand a range of environments from sitting on the ground in the Texas heat to flying at altitude,” Troy Hoeger, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s T-7A chief developmental tester, said in a statement. “The climatic lab helps us do this in a deliberate and methodical way and will give us confidence that our new aircraft meets requirements.” 

The $9.2 billion Air Force program includes the purchase of 351 Boeing T-7A jets, 46 simulators, and support.

The post Air Force’s T-7 Red Hawk Undergoes New Round of Testing appeared first on FLYING Magazine.