The American arsenal of democracy delivered a huge number and variety of bombers during World War II. Among them were Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress; Consolidated’s B-24 Liberator series; North American’s B-25 Mitchell; and Martin’s B-26 Marauder. Excepting the B-29, all flew against every Axis power, from the Pacific and Aleutians to North Africa and Europe. But one latecomer barely got off the bench to play just before the final whistle: Consolidated’s little-known B-32 Dominator. If it’s remembered much at all it might be because of an unfortunate fact: a crewmember aboard a B-32 became the last United States combat fatality of the war.

Consolidated already had become a prominent factor in World War II aviation, producing not only the Army B-24 and Navy PB4Y series, but also the classic PBY Catalina and PB2Y Coronado flying boats. So when the Army Air Forces (AAF) sought another heavy bomber to fight alongside the B-29, it gave the San Diego firm the nod over four other contenders, giving the company the XB-32 order in September 1940. The planned aircraft would use the same 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines developed for the B-29 and share the concepts of a pressurized fuselage and remote-controlled gun turrets. The Army inspected the mockups and gave the go-ahead for prototypes in January 1941.

Showing some Liberator influence, the first XB-32 sported the same high-aspect-ratio Davis wing and twin tails. The inboard engines had reversible propellers to shorten the landing distance. However, the B-32’s rounded fuselage was aerodynamically sleeker than the B-24’s slab-sided airframe. Despite its similarity to the “very heavy” B-29, the Consolidated was designated a heavy bomber with an ultimate gross weight of 100,800 pounds versus 133,500 for the Boeing.

Dubbed the Dominator, the prototype XB-32 made its first flight on September 7, 1942, two years after Consolidated signed the contract. It crashed in May 1943, but the second prototype flew in July and the third in November. By then the configuration had seen some changes. It now had more of a “stepped” canopy, and the B-24-type twin tail had transformed into a high single tail similar to that of the Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer.

The program saw more changes as it progressed. Consolidated eliminated the pressurization and replaced the unreliable remote-controlled gun turrets with five manual twin mounts and the original three-blade props gave way to the B-29’s four. During flight tests in October 1944, Colonels Mark E. Bradley and Osmond J. Ritland reported a mixed impression of the aircraft, but noted, “Although the B-32 is a comparatively easy airplane to fly, it is not considered a pleasant airplane because of poor ‘feel,’ noise and vibration, excessive trim change with use of flaps, high landing and takeoff speeds.” They said that the Dominator “will not be a popular airplane with the services.”

Meanwhile, the B-32’s development had overlapped the 1943 merger between Consolidated and Vultee that led to the emergence of a new company, Convair. However, the corporate amalgam exerted little if any influence upon the Dominator program as the bombers began to roll off the production line at the company’s new plant in Fort Worth, Texas. 

In all, the AAF ordered 1,500 Dominators. Convair delivered the first production model in September 1944, but it soon suffered a nose wheel collapse on landing. Other bombers were delivered in November with unit-size introduction in late January 1945. By then it had become clear that the B-29 did not require a backup, so the Army directed that 40 B-32s be delivered as unarmed transition trainers. One detachment received orders to the Philippines for operational evaluation, though it was clear that the Dominator would see little combat. In the U.S. that summer, B-32s averaged a mere three hours flying time per month.

The Pacific-bound Dominators set out on an 8,300-mile global trek in May 1944, leaving Fort Worth for Mather Field, California, then flying on to Hickam Field, Hawaii, and from there to Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Guam in the Marianas, and on to Clark Field, Luzon. There the B-32 crews joined the 386th Bombardment Squadron of 312th Bombardment Group. The group was a Pacific old-timer under Lt. Col. Selmon Wells that had been flying Douglas A-20 Havocs. Just 25, Wells had flown with the group since late 1942 and had a wealth of combat experience.

The Dominator became the designated hitter for the 312th and took on a heavy bombardment role that was quite different from the light attack duties the squadron had been flying with its A-20s. One of the crewmembers making the transition to the Dominator was Staff Sgt. Julius Kossor, who noted in his diary that he was glad to leave the Havocs behind: “really had some close calls these last few missions,” he wrote.

In May the squadron’s commanding officer, Major “Pinky” Wilson, received his orders to return to the States. An original member from the squadron’s inception in October 1942, Wilson had flown 109 missions and amassed 320 hours, one of the group’s most notable records. Captain Ferdinand L. Svore replaced Wilson as new CO. He had arrived in July 1944 and served as squadron and group operations officer before taking command. On May 30, shortly after Svore’s promotion, the squadron ceased Havoc operations to begin B-32 missions. To prepare, ground staff visited the B-24-equipped 43rd Bomb Group to learn heavy bombardment organization and procedures. New personnel “began to trickle in” from the first of June, Kossor noted.

In that period Kossor wrote, “Our A-20s, with their pilots and gunners, were transferred out and assigned to the other three squadrons in the group. New crews, factory representatives and specialists joined the squadron, and preparations were under way to convert the 386th Bomb Squadron (Light) into a very heavy bomb squadron.”

The day before it ended all Havoc missions, the squadron flew the first B-32 raid of the war, an attack north of the Philippine capital of Manila. In a display of unit pride, the squadron report noted, “The outstanding raid of the month, and probably the most notable in this theatre, was the B-32 strike on May 29th. Two of three B-32s assigned to the 386th were sent on a mission to Antatet in the Cagayan Valley. If the Japs below took time to peek out of their foxholes, they must have been amazed to see eighteen 1,000 pounders dropped from only two planes. Bombing from 10,000 feet was excellent. All bombs were 100 percent on the target, scoring direct hits on a house and damaging a large tin-roofed warehouse.

“This, the first B-32 raid in the world, was the forerunner of future operations in the Pacific,” the report concluded, not quite accurately.

After addressing engine problems and deferred maintenance, in June the squadron’s three Dominators flew ten two-plane missions to drop 135 tons of bombs, mostly on Formosa (today Taiwan). Kossor flew his first heavy bomber mission on June 13 in one of two Dominators that struck a Formosa airfield. From the ball turret Kossor had “a perfect view of the target. Three bombs made direct hits on the runway. Others all around the field—no fighter interception and no damage to our two planes.” He judged the Dominator to be “a good fast ship.” 

By the end of June, the squadron, now equipped with three B-32s and a C-47B for miscellaneous duties, had logged ten missions (20 sorties) for 105 combat hours. The combat tests ended in July and other crews began making the transition to the new bomber. Then on July 30 the advance echelon began moving to Okinawa while the rest waited for a fourth B-32 to arrive. The unit diary noted, “All we had was the promise that more were on the way.” And there were: five B-32s headed overseas in July, and nine more in August. Still, that meant there were only 10 to 16 Dominator crews overseas between June and August, versus 1,200 or so B-29 crews.

The squadron properly noted that August 1945 was “an eventful month in world history resulting in a month of impatient waiting” for the 55 officers, 370 enlisted men and nine civilian technicians on the roster. On August 8 the bombers and supporting transports left Clark Field in the Philippines for Okinawa and landed with bombs aboard at Yontan. Shortly afterward the unit moved to nearby Kadena Airfield, already home to three bomb groups and a fighter group. The support staff’s “water echelon” sailed by ship and learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan along the way. A squadron officer wrote, “Despite the fact that the war was unofficially over, the 386th carried on a private war with the Empire of Japan.” On August 15 anti-shipping strikes were recalled upon Tokyo’s surrender announcement.

However, the new arrivals still had work to do. On the 16th, reconnaissance missions scouted possible landing fields in Japan for the airborne troops who were due to arrive shortly. One Dominator turned back with engine problems but the other, Hobo Queen II, completed the flight.

On August 17 the 386th launched four photo sorties around Tokyo under the youthful Colonel Wells. During the two hours over Japan the individual bombers were harassed and attacked by flak and Japanese Navy pilots who ignored the surrender announcement that had gone out two days before. Sergeant Kossor said it was the “roughest mission I ever had.” He was flying with Wells, who had told him to leave his ball turret up because it created too much drag when lowered. Then Japanese fighters attacked and Kossor had to scramble to get the turret down. “They attacked us from each wing, and then flew under my ball as they passed,” he noted. “A perfect target, but because I obeyed orders we may have crashed in Tokio. Then we got hit with flak. It was heavy and damn accurate.” Anti-aircraft fire put shrapnel into a wing, but Wells proceeded to Yokosuka where he found the flak was even thicker but experienced little threat from fighters.

That wasn’t the case with two other Dominators. In the Yokosuka area they aborted their photo runs due to cloud cover but conducted shootouts at 20,000 feet. The gunners claimed one fighter destroyed and another damaged before heading seaward with gunfire damage to a wing.

The fourth bomber had an even rougher time. In a 15-minute set-to, several Japanese ganged up on the Dominator from six o’clock. An upper turret gunner set his sights on the closest and watched his tracers sparkle on the green airframe. Obviously stricken and streaming smoke, the assailant dropped into the undercast. But the tail turret failed and the Japanese noticed the weakness. They renewed their attacks from astern although the bomber escaped without serious damage and landed with the others about four hours later. The unit diarist recorded, “Approximately ten fighter planes attacked the formation, resulting in two probables for our side.”

Of greater concern to Far East air forces was what Japanese fighter opposition meant. Presumably the interim agreement made before the formal surrender allowed Allied aircraft full access to Japanese airspace. Did the violent responses indicate a change in Tokyo policy or were the intercepts flown by dissidents who refused to surrender?

The latter proved the case. Years later a prominent Japanese Navy ace, Lieutenant (j.g.) Saburo Sakai, explained his rationale for opposing the B-32 flights. His commanding officer had stated that if any pilots wanted to intercept the Americans, he would look the other way. When the B-32s came into sight that day, Sakai and his fellow pilots decided to attack them. “While Japan did agree to the surrender, we were still a sovereign nation, and every nation has the right to protect itself,” Sakai asserted. He claimed that the Japanese did not know the B-32s’ intentions and that the Americans should have waited before sending more airplanes over Japan. “They should have waited and let things cool down.”

The next day, the squadron flew two more photo sorties over Tokyo. The Dominators flew with extra observers and photographers to verify the situations at major airfields. The planes had completed their routes when crewmen noticed fighters airborne from the Atsugi airfield. “Fourteen Jap fighters engaged our bombers in twenty minutes of aerial combat,” the unit diary noted. “Two enemy planes were shot down and two probably destroyed. Gunners Houston and Smart were the sharpshooters.”

Lieutenant James Klein’s Hobo Queen II held an altitude advantage over Lieutenant John Anderson’s unnamed bomber, which was some 10,000 feet below. Anderson’s tail and top forward gunners put dozens of .50-caliber rounds on target, seeing two dark green fighters gush flames or explode. The nose gunner swapped gunfire with Lieutenant Sadamu Komachi, survivor of the Darwinian winnowing Japanese pilots had experienced since Pearl Harbor. The veteran shot out the Dominator’s port inboard engine, blew the plexiglass off the top rear turret, and damaged the rudder.

During the shootout one of the photographers, Staff Sgt. Joseph Lacharite, received wounds in both legs, so Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione, a young Pennsylvanian on his first B-32 mission, laid him on a cot and took over the first-aid effort. Moments later a 20mm shell exploded in the fuselage, inflicting a massive chest wound on Marchione. Five of his fellow crewmen tried to keep him alive, applying pressure while administering plasma and oxygen.

Attended by his friends, Tony Marchione died at age 19, high over Japan and far from his home in Pennsylvania. The two bombers landed at Kadena that evening, Anderson’s making it on three engines.

Anthony Marchione almost certainly was the last American killed in combat during the Second World War. Historian Stephen Harding wrote a bittersweet account of the young sergeant’s life, death and family in his book, Last to Die. It remains the definitive account of Marchione’s death. “

The War was supposed to be over Aug. 15, but our men are still gettin’ killed,” Kossor griped in his diary. “To us it isn’t over for some time yet. Nobody’s celebratin’ ‘The End’ over here. Because the war is supposed to be over, we do not get combat time for these missions. We got the rotten deal of flyin’ ’em ‘on the house!’” 

Ten days later the unit diary noted, “August 28 was probably the saddest day in the history of the 312th Group.” In two disastrous crashes, 15 officers and men were killed. One plane was taking off when it crashed at the end of the runway. There were no survivors. The other B-32, after completing a recon mission, developed engine trouble and flew to within 175 miles of Okinawa on two engines. Two crewmembers died in the bailout but the rest survived and “spent a pleasant cruise on two destroyers and returned a week later.”

After the signing of the peace treaty on September 2, a bomber from the 386th Squadron departed for the States, representing the first airplane from Fifth Air Force to return from Japan. The unit diarist closed, “So ended the glorious history of the 386th Bomb Squadron; activated three years ago in Savannah as a dive bomb outfit; flew fighter patrols over New Guinea in P-40s; bombed and strafed New Guinea and the Philippines in A-20s; received a Presidential Citation for operations against Formosa; flew the first B-32s in combat and participated in the last aerial combat of World War II.”

The war’s finish also spelled the end to the B-32. The Army Air Forces no longer needed the Dominator. Only 114 had rolled out of the Fort Worth Consolidated-Vultee plant by the time production ceased—a far cry from the 1,500 originally planned. Today not a single B-32 remains. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Those of us who still build the occasional model airplane on a rainy weekend have noticed that the small hobby shops that filled their shelves with colorful boxes of airplanes, tanks and the occasional 1967 Chevy Camaro have been disappearing from the American landscape. The classic model companies of our youth—Comet, Hawk and Lindberg—have also gone away. Even 1970s and ’80s stalwarts like Revell and Monogram combined forces at one point but have since been bought by a German business group.

Over time tastes also changed and the older, less-detailed kits became a bit passé. Modelers wanted more accurate scale models that they could build into “museum quality” reproductions. We wanted to build the P-51D, not the B version, and have a better choice of bombs or rockets and at least three different choices of markings. The heavy steel molds that produced those earlier kits wound up on warehouse shelves, waiting to be melted down.

Or maybe not.

In 2009 Atlantis Hobbies, based on Long Island just outside of New York City, began looking for some of those older out-of-production molds. Their mission was to produce nostalgia by bringing back the classic kits that got us all started. They quickly amassed a veritable museum of plastic model history, nostalgic items that can fill important spots in any collection. They range from rare aircraft like the P6M Seamaster and Convair 990 airliner to the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the “Rat Fink” hot rods of the 1960s. For me, Atlantis brought back memories of building kits while trying desperately to keep glue from getting on the kitchen table. I’m looking forward to the next addition to their collection and a few more memories on some rainy weekend.

One of Atlantis’s classic kits is the 1/48th-scale Curtiss JN-4D Jenny, originally produced by Lindberg in 1955. Lindberg was an early plastic scale-model company in the United States, producing a wide range of imitation boats and automobiles in the 1940s. Their line of airplane kits ranged from early Cold War fighters to the classic biplanes of World War I. Light on detail, which is typical of the time, the Lindberg Jenny is simple to put together and reasonably accurate. Perhaps skills learned over the years will help you make a more detailed version this time around.

The model is molded in a deep green color. After cleaning up the parts in a solution of water and dish soap, adding a coat of a light-colored primer is good idea. Now it’s time to get down to business.

Like the real thing, the cockpit is a simple affair—two seats, control sticks, rudder bars and a pair of shapes that double as control panels. Paint the cockpit floor and the control panels a light tan, then lightly streak with a darker color to imitate wood grain. Paint the inside of the cockpit area a slightly darker tan. A pair of after-market resin seats with a period wicker look will take the place of the kit parts. Add a pair of simple seat belts to give cockpit some extra interest. The kit provides a couple of decals that represent the few cockpit instruments.  

It’s time to finish the fuselage. The two halves fit well, but here’s here where the kit shows a little of its age. Minor flash and sink marks from the original molds are unavoidable and need a little care. Filling and sanding these flaws will require a bit of putty and a fair amount of patience. They are most noticeable across the lower wing. Once everything is smooth, you’re ready to get painting. For this military version of the airplane, the fabric part of the fuselage (to the rear of the cockpit) should be a pale tan color. The forward section was made of metal and should be masked off and painted olive green. The edge of each cockpit was lined with leather, so paint that area a reddish-brown color and set aside the finished fuselage to dry.

Next, paint the wings, rudder and horizontal stabilizer the same light tan color as the fuselage. The struts should be a darker wood brown. Landing gear struts and the tail skid should also have that wooden look.

Cement the lower wings, horizontal stabilizer and rudder to the fuselage. Give the assembly a coat of clear gloss and you can begin to add the airplane’s markings. Decals are a simple affair, and the kit has a nice set replicating the original version that came with the old Lindberg kit. Markings for a post-war Barnstormer and a color guide that shows a more historically accurate U.S. Army Air Service color scheme are provided with the instructions.

It’s time to attach the upper wing, always a part of the build I found tricky when I was younger. Take your time as you place the struts into their positions. Carefully add the landing gear and tail skid and the Jenny starts to look like the classic trainer it is. Give the airplane another coat of clear varnish to seal the decals.

The JN-4D is a web of rigging, wires and cables that control ailerons and stabilizers and supporting struts that hold the whole thing together. It has a spindly, fragile look that belies the stable airplane that it was. Pay close attention to your research in order to accurately rig the airplane. Open up that big box of patience; you’ll need it and probably spend more time here than you did actually building the airplane. The results will be well worth the effort.

Start rigging from the center and work out toward the wingtips. A number of companies produce a thin thread that is easy to use with a bit of superglue. “Old School” modelers might opt for thinly stretched sprue, a time-consuming technique to master. Tackle the back half of the airplane with the cables connecting the horizontal stabilizer and rudder. Remember to step back from time to time in order to let the cement cure and not get too far ahead of yourself. Patience.

With the complex rigging complete, it’s time to add the engine, radiator and propeller. Paint the engine aluminum with a dark wash to pick out details. Paint the radiator a metallic color and the area around the outside copper. The propeller should be painted a brown “oak” and you can drybrush a darker color to simulate streaks of wood grain. The hub is steel. Many props were fitted with metal tips and a leading edge. A touch of brass colored paint does the trick.

The kit comes with two tiny clear windscreen parts. While you might want to use them, cutting two pieces from a sheet of clear plastic looks a bit more to scale.

With the windscreens attached and the Jenny fully rigged, it’s time to find it a prime spot among your collection of early biplanes.

Atlantis gave me a couple of nostalgic weekends, and I appreciate the reminiscing and the chance to add a classic airplane to my display shelf. I look forward to getting another taste of nostalgia soon.

The Boeing Stratocruiser was the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. Passengers loved it, but it still failed as a commercial transport. Its mainline service career lasted only a decade, thanks to the one-two punch of eye-watering operating costs and the arrival of the more efficient Boeing 707. It didn’t help that the Stratocruisers’ high-tech propellers often tore themselves loose from the engines, leaving the worldwide fleet with a stupefying accident record. Of the 56 Stratocruisers Boeing built, Pan American Airways alone lost seven—almost one a year between 1952 and 1959. United, Northwest Orient and BOAC each crashed one. Surviving Strats ended up being sold for scrapyard prices. But those junked airplanes led to the development of a remarkable new category of aircraft known as volumetric transports—or, more familiarly, Guppies.

Boeing called the Stratocruiser the Model 377, and its lineage led from…well, nits are painstakingly picked over this issue. Many say that the roots of its family tree were fertilized by the B-29 Superfortress, or at least the later B-50 version, which used the R-4360 engines that would power the Stratocruiser. Others point to Boeing’s double-deck C-97 Stratofreighter and its aerial-refueling tanker version, the KC-97. (To Boeing, these two B-50 derivatives were called Model 367s.) Conventional 1940s aeronautical engineering theory held that there was a limit to an airplane’s fuselage diameter relative to wingspan and powerplants, so most aircraft were designed with a small fuselage and large wings. The porcine Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, the first big postwar transport, pushed fuselage diameter to the max that convention would allow. The C-97, however, pushed things even further.

Some Boeing nerds nominate a single modified Model 367 as the Stratocruiser’s daddy. It was a C-97 that had been fitted out as a passenger-carrying VIP transport, with 80 seats and multiple windows on two levels, called the YC-97B and later designated the C-97B. Boeing built only one.

Its mechanical antecedents notwithstanding, the Stratocruiser came into being thanks largely to one man: Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Terry Trippe. Some assumed from Trippe’s first name that he was Latino. Others accused him of adopting the name to make himself attractive to the South American market where Pan Am originally flew. The truth is that Trippe was a whitebread Yalie who had been named after a distant Venezuelan relative, Juanita Terry. After graduating from Yale, Trippe had worked as a Wall Street financier until he decided to enter the aviation business in 1922, first with a company called Long Island Airways and later with a Florida-based company that evolved into Pan American World Airways. In the years leading up to World War II, Trippe made Pan American Airways synonymous with luxury, grace and prestige by operating a fleet of four-engine Boeing and Martin flying boats over Atlantic and Pacific routes, particularly from San Francisco to Hawaii. These airplanes were the most opulent of their time, and they flew for a coterie of wealthy travelers who had survived the Great Depression. After the war, Trippe wanted to lure this clique back to the Pan Am, but the long runways constructed during the war could now support landplanes like the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-4 and -6, effectively putting the fancy flying boats out of business.

Pan Am had been operating a small fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners—a pressurized derivative of the B-17 Flying Fortress—but the “Stratoclipper,” as Pan Am dubbed it, was not a success. It didn’t have the range to either cross the Atlantic or fly nonstop across the U.S. The Constellation blew it away, and the Constellation was being operated by Howard Hughes’ TWA. This infuriated Trippe, who hated Hughes, and it had a lot to do with Trippe’s motivation as the Model 377’s launch customer.

Trippe wanted to offer luxury travel with a new semi-double deck airliner that Boeing president William Allen proposed in 1945 and called the Model 377 Stratocruiser. It had a distinctive stepless, glazed-beachball nose and a 14-seat “downstairs” cocktail lounge, accessed via a tight spiral staircase. (Not until the 747 would there be another such extravagance, though the lounge was upstairs rather than down and was quickly turned into revenue space with rows of first-class seats.) Boeing suggested a high-density, 95-seat version of the 377 to be called the Stratocoach, but Trippe recoiled. He wanted a luxury liner, not a cattle car—an airplane to compete with sumptuous ocean liners. 

Trippe ordered 20 Stratocruisers (and later purchased the prototype) with the proviso that Boeing supply none to any airline before Pan Am had at least six. Pan Am paid $1,304,390 each, not including spares, and the airline took delivery of that batch in Oregon instead of Boeing’s home state of Washington, to avoid paying the latter state’s sales tax. At the time, Constellations sold for $1,200,000 and DC-6s went for under a million. After Pan Am, Northwest Orient became the second-biggest Stratocruiser operator by purchasing ten. American Overseas Airlines ordered eight and United bought seven. Swedish Intercontinental Airlines (SILA), soon to become the core of the Scandinavian SAS consortium, bought four, and Britain’s BOAC ordered six to use until the de Havilland Comet jet became operational.

For its Stratocruisers, Pan Am hired the modernist industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to lay out the interiors. Teague used muted colors and simple patterns—no busy floral prints, just gentle lines to match the horizon, so passengers wouldn’t be jarred by looking out a window and then back into the cabin. Everything was done to make the cabin seem wider and taller and to avoid designs that might encourage motion sickness.

At Pan Am’s request, Boeing installed air conditioning that could run independently of other aircraft systems, so that passengers who wished to stay asleep in their berths after the Stratocruiser landed could do so in comfort. Some sleeping berths were wide enough for two, encouraging membership in the four-mile-high club, and an aft compartment was even dubbed the Honeymoon Suite, since Hawaii was a popular destination for newlyweds. Unfortunately, it could turn into a rough ride, since the Stratocruiser was prone to porpoising in turbulent conditions.

The Stratocruiser was originally intended to have four 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines—the B-29’s powerplant—but it was Trippe who suggested using the R-4360s that had been developed for the B-50. They were the most advanced and powerful piston radials to go into production, but Trippe would come to regret his choice. It quickly became apparent that the bleeding-edge technology of the R-4360 and its huge four-blade propeller was not synonymous with reliability or safety. The Pratt & Whitney Corncobs (so named because their 28 cylinder heads resembled rows of kernels) were remarkable engines, putting out 3,500 water-injected horsepower on takeoff, but they pushed the materials and technology of the time beyond reasonable limits. They were a-bridge-too-far engines. Hawaii passengers on 377s would later routinely boast that they’d made it to Honolulu on three engines, occasionally two.

Boeing claimed that the 80-seat 377 would provide luxury, speed and range for just a penny per passenger mile, though this was almost certainly before the true specific fuel consumption of the R-4360 became apparent. Although R-4360s powered all of the super-large postwar airlifters—C-97, C-124 and XC-99—the engine had poor fuel specifics. It burned .43 gallons of gasoline per hour per horsepower while the ubiquitous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 used .38. DC-6s powered by R-2800s soldiered on well after the Stratocruiser was put out to pasture. 

The Strat was the first airliner with turbochargers, though they weren’t used to provide takeoff power. The advanced General Electric turbos joined the chorus during climb and cruise, to turbo-normalize the engines’ rated power. In fact, they doubled the R-4360’s output at altitude, which allowed it to cruise at over 300 mph at 25,000 feet. (Top speed was 340 mph.) The Stratocruiser was also the first American commercial aircraft to employ water injection, which boosted takeoff power from 3,000 to 3,500 horsepower. And it was the first airliner to use the more efficient underwing pressure fueling instead of above-wing gravity-fed fueling, but it still took about two and a half hours to top up the airplane’s standard 7,790-gallon nylon wing bladders. (Pan Am added capacity for an additional 360 gallons to 10 of its Strats, so they could make the New York-to-London trip nonstop. They called them Super Stratocruisers.) Northwest Orient claims to have used its Stratocruisers to become the first airline to serve liquor in U.S. airspace, in August 1959.

At one point Trippe asked Boeing to engineer a six-engine version of the Model 377. He wanted two Wright R-1820s outboard of the number-one and -four R-4360s. It’s not clear why Pan Am dreamed up this impractical mix. Perhaps because it knew how prone to failure the Pratts were? Or was Trippe simply fond of the classy six-engine airliner concept?  He was, after all, the only airline executive to express interest in a commercial version of the six-engine Convair B-36 bomber. Convair had proposed an airliner version of its XC-99, essentially a double-deck B-36, which Trippe saw as a 400-passenger leviathan that could support transcontinental ticket prices equivalent to bus fare. But feeding six ravenous R-4360s exceeded what any airline could afford. 

One of the secrets of the 377’s speed and range was the famous high-aspect-ratio “Boeing wing,” with its proprietary 117 airfoil. Originally designed for the B-29, it was particularly light yet efficient. The Model 377’s wing was 16 percent stronger, 650 pounds lighter and 26 percent more efficient than the original B-29 wing.  

Stratocruisers began coming apart within nine months of entering service. In January 1950 a Pan Am Strat dropped an engine into the Pacific en route to Tokyo. A day later, a Northwest Orient 377 had the number-one engine separate from the wing near Chicago. Pan Am suffered its first 377 passenger fatalities in April 1952, when a prop blade separated from the number-two engine over Brazil and the airplane shook itself to death, the pieces falling into the Amazon jungle. The wreckage was finally spotted three days later, but there were no survivors among the 50 passengers and crew. Nor was the number-two engine and prop ever found.

Investigators were initially baffled by the crashes, but it soon became apparent that the props were the airplane’s Achilles’ heel. Some Stratocruisers had Curtiss electric propellers, usually looked upon warily because of electric-gremlin-induced overspeeds and sudden in-flight prop reversals, but the Curtisses proved docile on the Stratocruiser. However, the typically reliable hydromatic Hamilton-Standard airscrews were not. That’s because the propeller company had lightened the big steel blades for the Stratocruiser by hollowing them and filling the voids with rubbery neoprene. The filler, glued in place, would break loose and quickly stuff itself into the outer extremity of the hollow space, flung outward by the prop’s rotation. The sudden imbalance would cause the prop tip and even the entire blade to break loose. The hollow blades were also prone to cracking or simply breaking.

The most notorious Stratocruiser accident occurred in October 1956, when a Pan Am Strat flying between Honolulu and San Francisco, on the last leg of a round-the-world trip, had a runaway number-one prop that the crew was unable to stop or feather. They oil-starved the engine, which seized, but the prop continued to windmill. The drag was massive. And then the number-four engine decided to ignore its throttle.

Barely aloft on two good engines in the middle of the night, the crew headed for the Coast Guard cutter Pontchartrain, which was on ocean-station duty just 40 miles away. The airplane orbited the cutter until daylight, and then the crew skillfully ditched alongside the ship. All 24 passengers and crew were rescued. Not until pilot Chesley Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles ditched their Airbus in the Hudson River in January 2009 was a water landing so celebrated, or so fully documented.

On November 8, 1957, another Pan Am Stratocruiser plunged into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and San Francisco. Thirty-eight passengers and six crew were lost, and the cause of the accident remains a mystery. Both the FBI and Pan Am were convinced that foul play was involved. Conspiracy theories revolved around the fact that there were a number of important French businessmen aboard, including a vice-president of automaker Renault, as well as a U.S. Air Force major supposedly involved in a clandestine operation of some sort and a former Navy frogman and demolition expert. Nor did it help that the flight’s purser was known to be an unhappy employee who owned a handful of blasting-cap detonators. 

In late 1958, 12 years after the 377 had first flown, the Civil Aeronautics Board finally issued an airworthiness directive requiring the removal of its hollow-core props. By that time, disintegrating props had resulted in the loss of a quarter of Pan Am’s Stratocruiser fleet, but federal bureaucracy ensured that the airplane’s propeller problems were dealt with somewhere between slowly and not at all.

The 56 Stratocruisers that Boeing built, including the prototype, were just a small portion of the 888 Model 367s and 377s Boeing manufactured, the vast majority of them C-97s and KC-97s. But the Stratocruiser was the airplane that established Boeing as an airliner builder. (The Model 314 Clipper flying boat was a small-run specialty airplane—just 12 built—not a mainline airliner.) But by the late 1950s, their luxury cachet meant little when the real jet set had turned to the 707. Low-cost airlines still flying props were looking for airplanes that were cheap to fly, not Stratocruisers. Transocean, an off-brand carrier that had amassed a fleet of 14 Stratocruisers, sold them all for $7,500 apiece—well less than the cost of a new Aston Martin DB-4 sports car.

The Stratocruiser’s rebirth as a family of super-sized Guppies was initially the work of two men: Jack Conroy and Leo Mansdorf. Conroy was a former B-17 pilot who had become a POW after being shot down over Germany. After the war he was an airline captain, California Air Guard weekend warrior and coast-to-coast record setter in an F-86A Sabre. Mansdorf was an obscure aircraft broker. Yet Mansdorf had bought up almost the entire surviving Stratocruiser fleet at literally a dime on the dollar. He had no idea what to do with them, but he couldn’t resist the bargain.

Mansdorf initially had the idea of grossly inflating Stratocruiser fuselages so they could transport rocket components for NASA. The space agency had been shipping rockets by barge from Texas to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, and the voyage took 25 days, with sea-air corrosion always a problem. Transport by air would cut shipping time to 18 hours, including loading and unloading, and every hour counted during the space race. For his part, Conroy had wanted the airplanes to start a California-to-Hawaii VIP airline, but he bought into Mansdorf’s concept after a well-lubricated lunch with Mansdorf and a bunch of airplane buddies who tossed around preposterous suggestions of what they could build to snare a NASA contract. 

NASA didn’t have the budget to develop the needed heavy lifter itself, and it would have been wildly expensive for Boeing, Douglas or Lockheed to design and engineer such a limited-use craft. Conroy, however, decided to develop a volumetric transport from surplus aircraft—Mansdorf’s Stratocruisers—using private funds from speculators. Conroy himself poured almost a million dollars into the project, under the company name of Aero Spacelines, Inc.

It was an enormous leap of faith. No established aeronautical engineer would buy into the concept of trying to fly an airplane with so extreme a fuselage diameter. But Conroy took the design beyond those assumed limitations. It was hard to imagine anybody developing a successful cargo carrier from the husks of so unsuccessful an airliner. And husks they were, for intact Stratocruisers weren’t used to build Guppies; instead, mix-and-match major components—cockpit sections, empennages, fuselages, wings—were patched together. Many of them were from C-97s, not Strats.

German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who had become the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1960, had been a pilot since the mid-1930s and had flown everything from Messerschmitt Me-109s to helicopters. He involved himself substantially in the Guppy program. The initial idea had been to carry rocket loads externally, atop Douglas C-133s, but von Braun quickly nixed that scheme. He was also a big help when the Federal Aviation Administration became antsy about granting Conroy’s monsters the supplemental type certificate required for a modified aircraft. Von Braun leaned on the FAA to get with the program.

The first of the bloated Stratocruisers was called the Pregnant Guppy and in 1963 it transported components of the Titan rocket used for the Gemini program and went on to fly parts of Apollo’s Saturn. The Super Guppy, next in line, replaced the PG’s R-4350 engines with either Pratt & Whitney or Allison turboprops (five were built). The Mini Guppy reverted to R-4360s and was built to carry conventional oversize commercial cargo. It was the only version to be fully FAA-certificated.

And here the Stratocruiser line dies out, with just one Super Guppy still being operated by NASA. Not a single Stratocruiser survives, not even as a static museum exhibit. The jets arrived just in time. Had anybody tried to push the Stratocruiser’s 1930s technology just one level further, it would have been a disaster. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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On October 5, 1869, just more than four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and 34 years before the Wright Brothers took off, Watson Fell Quinby was granted this patent for a human “Flying Machine.” The contraption used two side wings and a “dorsal wing,” supported by the shoulders and waist, powered by stay-cords attached to the feet, and guided or steered by hand. To our modern eyes, the device looks comical, of course. Had it worked, the old joke, “I just flew in from Newark, and boy are my arms tired,” would have been a reality. And it must have seemed ridiculous to those who lacked Quinby’s vision or foresight in an age without air travel.  

“We hardly think he will be able to compete with the swallows in this harness,” an 1871 article in Scientific American quipped about Quinby’s invention. “We would advise him to start from some low point at first, so that, if he should fall down, it will not hurt him much.”

He did not heed this advice. Quinby, born in 1825 and a successful physician, reportedly built his machine secretly in his carriage house in Newport, Del. When it came time to test it, he donned a skin-tight suit, strapped the machine to his body, and leapt into the air from the roof of a small building. He soon discovered its failings. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and family members who had gathered to witness the flight test, rescued him from the wreckage. Quinby’s dream of flight was undeterred. He patented an improved “Flying Apparatus” in 1872 and “Aerial Ship” in 1879. Neither of those inventions ever took off, either.  

He did live long enough to see powered air flight become a reality, and even become a factor in war. When he died in 1918 at the age of 93, the Wilmington Morning News penned his obituary, and wrote: “From boyhood Dr. Quinby delighted in mechanical experiment, and during his mature life has invented several useful devices since completing his airship, a rotary digger, a method of arch construction without the use of forms and centers, a conduit for underground wires and pipes.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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There was a time when Harris & Ewing was the nation’s largest photo agency. Based on F Street in downtown Washington, D.C. (the agency’s main studio building still stands and is on the National Register of Historic Places), the agency expanded into multiple studios, had up to 120 employees and used a legion of freelance photographers. Many of those photographers turned their lenses on the airplanes and pilots who passed through the nation’s capital, providing a unique snapshot of the golden age of aviation.

George W. Harris was born in Wales, emigrated to the United States in 1881 and had worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas before finding work as a photographer in San Francisco. There he met Martha Ewing, who had her own studio. The two became partners. Supposedly President Theodore Roosevelt himself talked Harris into relocating to Washington, which he did in 1905. He became the White House photographer and oversaw the steadily increasing business of Harris & Ewing. Harris bought Ewing out in 1915 and he sold the business 30 years later. Before he died in 1964, Harris donated some 70,000 of the agency’s photographs to the Library of Congress.

Many of those images depict the aviation comings and goings in Washington. They include some famous pilots—Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh—as well as politicians, socialites and more obscure figures whose names are lost to history, often photographed standing somewhat stiffly in front of an airplane. The menagerie of aircraft captured by the agency’s photographers run the gamut from navy flying boats to the tiny Verville-Sperry M-1 Messenger that Lawrence Sperry used to land at the U.S. Capitol. Presidents, cabinet officials, military figures make their appearances, as do inventors eager to promote their latest contributions to the science of aviation. 

This was a time when flight had captured the public imagination—and Harris & Ewing photographers were on hand to capture aviation history with their cameras. 

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To this day the U.S. Naval Airship USS ZMC-2 remains unique in the history of lighter-than-air craft. Most airships fall under one of three basic construction formats: rigid, non-rigid or semi-rigid. However, the ZMC-2 employed a completely different construction method with a rigid, metal-covered envelope. 

The most common airship type is the non-rigid, epitomized by today’s Goodyear blimps. These airships have a control car supported beneath a fabric-covered gas envelope, the shape of which is maintained by air-filled “ballonets.” The much larger rigid airships had a metal or wooden framework covered with fabric that enclosed a number of separate, individual internal gas bags. German Zeppelins like the doomed Hindenburg were rigid airships. A semi-rigid airship had a gas envelope supported by a rigid wooden or metallic keel. The best-known examples were the Norge and Italia, constructed in Italy during the 1920s and employed for Arctic exploration.  

However, the U.S. Navy’s USS ZMC-2, which was designed and built by the Aircraft Development Corporation of Detroit at the Naval Air Station at Grosse Ile, Michigan, embodied a unique approach to airship design that has never been replicated since. The ZMC-2 had a lightweight aluminum interior framework, but instead of fabric its outer covering consisted of thin sheets of Alclad, a lightweight metal of duralumin alloy coated with a layer of pure aluminum to prevent corrosion. The Alclad plates were riveted together by means of a special process developed expressly to render the envelope airtight and prevent gas leakage. In effect, the outer covering of the ZMC-2’s envelope was an Alclad-covered monocoque pressure vessel similar to the fuselages later used on pressurized high-altitude airliners. Unlike rigid airships, the ZMC-2 had no individual internal gas bags—the helium lifting gas was contained entirely within the metal envelope itself. Inside, a pair of flexible air-filled ballonets regulated internal pressure at various altitudes and states of atmospheric pressure, similar to the arrangement employed in non-rigid airships. The ballonets occupied 25% of the internal volume.

The ZMC-2’s envelope was solid, so it did not collapse when deflated. For that reason, the envelope was normally full of air and could not be filled directly with helium because that lifting gas mixes with, rather than displaces, air. As a result, the creators of the ZMC-2 came up with a technique where they first replaced the air inside the envelope with carbon dioxide, a gas that is heavier than, and does not mix with, helium. They then added helium through the top of the envelope while siphoning off the heavier CO2 from the bottom.   

The ZMC-2’s designer was Ralph Hazlett Upson, who had previously worked for the Goodyear Corporation developing airships and had won the Gordon Bennett Cup for an international balloon race in 1913. In 1922 Upson established the Aircraft Development Corporation (renamed the Detroit Aircraft Corporation in 1929) with financial backing from a number of Detroit industrialists, including Henry and Edsel Ford, William Stout (creator of the Ford Tri-Motor) and Charles Kettering of General Motors. By 1929 the company had expanded to include controlling interests in other aviation assets such as the Ryan Aircraft, Lockheed and Blackburn Aircraft companies and the Grosse Ile Airport near Detroit.

First flown on August 19, 1929, the ZMC-2 was relatively small because Upson intended it only as an experimental test bed for its revolutionary construction technique. The airship’s naval designation of “ZMC” stood for “Lighter-Than-Air Ship, Metal Clad.” 

With a length of 149 feet and a diameter of 53 feet, the ZMC-2 had an internal capacity of 202,200 cubic feet (apparently the “2” in its name referred to this figure) and a useful lift of 750 pounds. (Compare this to the Hindenburg’s internal capacity of more than seven million cubic feet and its lifting capacity of 511,500 pounds.) The ZMC-2  was powered by a pair of 220-hp Wright J-5 Whirlwind radial engines and had a top speed of 62 mph, a cruising speed of 50 mph and a range of 680 miles. There were three crewmembers. (The Hindenburg had 40.)An unusual and distinctive feature of the ZMC-2’s design was that it had eight stabilizing fins arranged radially around the tail, four of which incorporated control surfaces.  

Many in the Navy expressed skepticism at the idea of “Tin Blimps.” Even the ZMC-2’s first commanding officer, Lt. (j.g.) Hammond J. Dugan, expressed reluctance to fly in the metal-clad airship. Nonetheless, ZMC-2 confounded the skeptics by completing 752 flights for a total of 2,265 flying hours before being grounded in 1939 and scrapped in 1941. Ironically, the ZMC-2 outlived Dugan, who died in the crash of the USS Akron in 1933.

The ZMC-2’s successful flight record notwithstanding, the Navy remained uninterested in the concept, believing it too small and short-ranged to be useful for the anti-submarine work for which it was intended. In any case the Navy preferred to spend its lighter-than-air budget on the huge, expensive and ultimately disastrous rigid airships USS Akron and USS Macon and later on smaller but more useful and cost-effective non-rigid blimps. The historical record includes no specific explanation of the Navy’s reasoning. Perhaps it considered the metal-clad airship too heavy or too expensive. Maybe it had something to do with the influence of the Goodyear Corporation over the Navy’s lighter-than-air aviation program. It was Goodyear that ended up manufacturing all of the Navy’s other airships, including the rigid behemoths as well as its blimps. Whatever the reasons, it seems a shame since, by airship standards, the ZMC-2 appears to have been one of the more successful examples of the type. But it never received much publicity, and it remains far more obscure than the less successful but more conspicuous Akron and Macon. 

Its parent company fared no better. Depression hit the Detroit Aircraft Corporation hard, and it went into receivership in 1931, divesting its heavier-than-air assets to Lockheed and what remained of its lighter-than-air assets under the Metalclad Airship Corporation. Once the Navy expressed no further interest in the concept and no further orders were forthcoming, the Metalclad Airship Corporation soon ceased to exist. 

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While many aviation museums may display a Boeing B-29 Superfortress or B-17 Flying Fortress or even a Consolidated B-24 Liberator, very few possess a Douglas B-18 (Bolo) bomber. In fact, many aviation enthusiasts have never even heard of, let alone seen, a B-18. There are good reasons for this. Douglas built only 350, and few of those saw active service in World War II. Only six B-18 airframes still exist (and one of those is from a Bolo that crashed in 1941 in Hawaii, where its wreckage remains to this day, exposed to the elements).

The B-18 was based on Douglas’s DC-2 commercial transport and the Army named it the Bolo after the famed curved knife. The prototype made its first flight in April 1935. Manned by a crew of six and with an operational range of 2,100 miles, the twin-engine Bolo could carry up to 4,500 pounds of bombs and had a top speed of 215 mph. Already obsolete by the start of World War II, many B-18s that flew in combat were equipped with magnetic anomaly detectors and used for anti-submarine warfare. 

One B-18A, currently on display at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver, Colorado, has undergone a remarkable restoration after a lifetime of literal and metaphorical ups and downs. The aircraft, serial number 39-025, rolled off the Douglas assembly line in 1940, the second-to-last B-18 ever constructed. Delivered to the United States Army Air Corps on February 20 of that year, the Bolo started its operational life as a training airplane at Chanute Field in Illinois. Subsequent stints as a trainer followed in Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Ohio and California. 

In November 1944, 39-025 was removed from the government’s inventory and wound up with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC focused on supporting local economies through loans and the support of banks, but it also became known during and after World War II for its role in handling surplus military aircraft. At one point the RFC owned more than 100,000 aircraft, including thousands of fighters and bombers.  

The B-18 then passed through several civilian hands after the RFC sold it for $3,000, and it became a workhorse for various owners throughout the 1940s, serving as a cargo aircraft, aerial photography platform, agricultural sprayer and forest firefighter. A veterinarian who owned it may have used the airplane to transport animals. The original Wright 1820-53 engines were replaced several times with the same or similar models. The 1950s again saw the airplane change hands repeatedly and it flew as a cargo hauler, magnetic field mapper and sprayer in Oregon, Alaska, Florida and Cuba. 

This particular B-18 is perhaps best known for its (brief) role in Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba. In 1958, the U.S. Border Patrol impounded the aircraft in Florida after its then-owner flew it to an abandoned airfield near Fort Lauderdale and loaded it with guns, ammunition and other equipment in packages marked “Fidel.” The border patrol turned the airplane over to U.S. Customs, which eventually returned it to the U.S. Air Force at its request and from 1961 to 1974 it was on display at the Air Force’s museum. After that it received some limited restoration at New Mexico’s Cannon Air Force Base in the late 1970s, and finally made its way to the Lowry Heritage Museum in Colorado in 1988. The aircraft arrived on flatbed trucks in several pieces. Their reassembly officially kicked off the current restoration. 

The venerable airplane required extensive cleaning, since innumerable birds had made it their home over the years. Work continued as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Lowry Air Force Base shut down and the Lowry Heritage Museum became Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. Progress was slow, mostly due to limited funds and other competing restoration efforts. 

The original nose had long since been re- placed with an enclosed fiberglass one, but the restorers wanted to return the aircraft to a configuration that was correct for the 1930s and 1940s. Helpful individuals at McDonnell Douglas provided plans and specifications and the Raytheon corporation offered assistance to create a new nose from scratch. Local expertise in sheet metal working and aircraft fabrication were also critical to the restoration effort. Key restoration team members included Helen “Jaymes” Bond, Tom Thayer, Bob Kohler, Steve Groth, David Tomecek and Mike Smaling, but many more individuals were involved in the project over the years.

The aircraft arrived with a dark green paint scheme, but by the late 1990s and early 2000s it was painted light green with a blue/gray patch on the belly (to mimic wartime camouflage coloring). This paint, and other layers below it, was eventually stripped away to reveal the underlying aluminum skin and rivets, much as the airplane would have appeared when it first rolled off the factory floor.

To give a sense of just how labor intensive the restoration has been, each individual bolt on the wings was removed and cleaned before being put back into place. The engine cowlings that the aircraft arrived with were not original, having been fabricated at Cannon AFB, and have since been removed. Last year the restorers replaced one of the cowlings, using 3D printing to replace the forward three inches with plastic. “We’ve accomplished what we can without correcting some major external items,” says museum curator Chuck Stout. Items that were replaced over the years included the rear cargo door, bomb bay and lower turret.

The B-18, which is officially on loan from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (which has its own B-18 on display), now provides a centerpiece for the museum’s collections. Visitors to the museum will find it impossible not to notice, and be a bit awed by, the B-18 and its shiny aluminum skin. “Our [B-18] has seen a lot in its lifetime,” says Tomecek. “The restoration is a testament to the dedication of Wings Over the Rockies and the Restorations team to a combination of this specific aircraft, the local area and the more unique aspects of its 80-year history.”

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“Here I go, here I go,” Cromwell Dixon shouted as the Curtiss biplane he had dubbed the Hummingbird started to plummet.

It was October 2, 1911, and Dixon was performing at the Spokane Interstate Fairgrounds in Washington State. At only 19 years old, he was the country’s youngest licensed pilot and one of the first superstars of the skies. A few days earlier, Dixon had made history in Montana and headlines across the country when he became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide. The “boy aeronaut” had been planning an even more ambitious flight: crossing the country in 30 days or less to win the $50,000 prize offered by publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst. 

Flying was “his one ambition” said Annie Dixon, the mother he adored. He carried a picture of her as he traveled the country, performing for awed spectators who craned their heads skyward to see the miracle of flight for the first time.

Dixon was born on July 9, 1892, in San Francisco. His father died soon after, and the pregnant, widowed Annie Dixon moved her growing family to Columbus, Ohio, where she scratched out a living by sewing and renting rooms to students from Ohio State University. 

There didn’t seem to be anything the young, gifted Cromwell Dixon couldn’t do, and do well. As a pre-teen, he was adept at taking apart and reassembling clocks, cameras and toy boats, improvising improvements for the mechanical devices. When he was 10, he built a rollercoaster for the neighborhood kids to ride, and a motorcycle the following year. “Aside from his powers as an inventor, Cromwell is an all around athlete, and not only has a gym in the house, but a basket ball team which plays in his barn loft,” wrote The Columbus Dispatch in 1906.

After watching a dirigible exhibition, Dixon became obsessed with flying and began working on his homemade “sky-cycle,” a pedal-powered dirigible. On June 9, 1907, the 14-year-old made an hour-long flight “in the presence of more than 500 people at the Columbus Driving Park [racetrack], his elevations ranging from 50 to 200 feet,” according to The Cincinnati Enquirer. 

Dixon barely averted disaster that July 4 in Wellston, Ohio. As he ascended aboard his sky-cycle, “he was brushed from the airship by the top of a large tree and fell 80 feet to the ground,” reported the Times Recorder of Zanesville, Ohio. “The branches broke the force of his fall and he was unhurt.” Dixon later added an engine to his sky-cycle and the teen toured the country, thrilling crowds with his youth and flying prowess.

As the success—and growing rivalry—of the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss heated up, Dixon became determined to make the leap from dirigibles to airplanes. He earned license #43 from the Aero Club of America on August 6, 1911. Flying a Curtiss aircraft during his test flights at the Long Island aerodrome, Dixon landed within “five feet of the mark set for him, while on the other he came within eight feet of the line,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle.

The heyday of barnstorming and the era of those daring young men in their flying machines was still a decade away, but the Wright brothers and Curtiss had both formed flying exhibition teams in 1910 to promote their airplanes. Dixon joined the Curtiss team soon after earning his wings and began participating in exhibitions around the country.

Crashes were all too common for these pioneers, who flew machines of varying degrees of airworthiness in often-dangerous conditions—wind being a special enemy of the unstable aircraft—to meet the demands of their contracts. On August 28, 1911, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Dixon suffered some minor injuries when the wheels of his aircraft hit a ditch and flipped over as he landed.

Dixon arrived in Helena for the Montana State Fair in late September 1911 in what the city’s Independent-Record called less-than-ideal conditions, with “a stiff breeze blowing from the west.” A better-known, more experienced pilot had been promised by the Curtiss manager, and local officials weren’t exactly thrilled with this “inexperienced youngster.” Dixon decided to prove the skeptics wrong on September 30 by setting off to cross the Continental Divide. He took off at 2:08 p.m., carrying a letter from Montana governor Edwin Norris addressed to the residents of Blossburg, Dixon’s intended destination. Little is known about this first high-altitude crossing of the Rockies, other than that Dixon arrived in Blossburg at 2:34 p.m. after about a 15-mile flight. “Not since the days when man invaded the domain of the birds and made possible the conquest of the air has a human being flown across the Rocky mountains,” read the governor’s poetic letter. “This seemingly impossible task has at last been accomplished, the backbone of the continent has been crossed.”

On his return flight, Dixon battled treacherous winds that made it difficult for him to gain altitude as he approached the Mullan Pass, which has an elevation of 6,200 feet. After what Spokane, Washington’s Spokesman-Review called “considerable tacking and veering,” he reached 7,000 feet and cleared the pass.

Dixon received a prize of $10,000 for his feat and began plans for the transcontinental flight. He hoped to depart on October 10 from Portland, Oregon, with a special train from the Great Northern Railway accompanying him across the country. But first, Dixon was scheduled to fly at the Spokane Interstate fairgrounds. (For more about the competition for the $50,000 Hearst prize, see “The Many Crashes of Cal Rodgers” in the Winter 2023 issue.) 

Dixon took off on his first Spokane flight on October 2. As he banked for a turn, a sudden gust of wind “caught the plane, already at an angle, and before the operator could recover himself he was plunged head first to the track,” reported the Tacoma Daily Ledger. “He was rushed to the hospital but nothing could be done to save him.”

A day or two later, the New York World interviewed Annie Dixon. “There was nothing but bravery in my boy,” she said. “His one aim was to become the greatest flyer and in spite of the dangers of his hazardous work he tried and tried until he was successful.” 

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The Wehrmacht jarred the Allies into action when it introduced gliders to the fight for Belgium in 1940 and Crete in 1941. By 1942, the U.S. had developed its own glider prototype, the Waco CG-4A, to deliver men and materiel to the front or behind enemy lines and supplement the transport aircraft that dropped paratroopers and supplies. The high-wing monoplane, made primarily of fabric and plywood over steel tubing, could carry up to 13 fully equipped troops or an array of heavy machinery—7,500 pounds in total. Ford and several other companies built nearly 14,000 wartime gliders.  The engineless CG-4A had to be tethered and towed to its destination, a job most often performed by Douglas C-47 Skytrains. The gliders saw extensive service in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and during the 1944 campaigns in France and the Netherlands. But it wasn’t a refined system. Once released, pilots in mass operations often had to complete for viable landing spots, and quite a few gliders crashed. One American private recalled the scene on the ground: “We thought it was incoming artillery when they began crashing in, and we began looking for cover.” In theory, the gliders could be retrieved by C-47s via a tail hook and pick-up cord, but this proved difficult in real-life situations, and most CG-4As were abandoned or destroyed after landing. Despite this, after D-Day Allied Supreme Headquarters reported “sober satisfaction” with the gliders’ performance. After the war, most CG-4As were sold for parts. Some, their wings and tails detached, saw second lives as trailer homes or vacation cabins.

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Miguel Granados was a colonel in Guatemala’s air corps who, accompanied by Lieutenant Carlos Merlen, flew a Ryan Brougham from Guatemala to Washington’s Bolling Field, arriving on July 31, 1929 — when this photo was taken. The six-day, 2,832-mile flight to Washington included stops in Havana, Cuba, and Jacksonville, Florida. The inspiration for the journey came from Charles Lindbergh’s Guatemala visit during his goodwill tour of Mexico and Central America in the Spirit of St. Louis the year before.

On their way to Washington, the Guatemalan flyers spent four days in Havana, where they waited to deliver a goodwill message to President Gerardo Machado, who had left for a weekend in the country. At their next stop in Jacksonville, the chamber of commerce threw a banquet in their honor. With the ground obscured by fog for most of the flight from Florida to Washington, Granados and Merlen — who were navigating with an ordinary road map — were forced to circle above Fayetteville, North Carolina, for half an hour before they could figure out where they were.

After reaching Washington, the two men presented a goodwill message from Guatemala’s President Lazaro Chacon to President Herbert Hoover at the White House. Then, according to an article in the New York Times, “The two fliers will spend the next two days visiting Mount Vernon and sightseeing in Washington, and will take off again Saturday, weather permitting, for a two-stop flight to Mexico City, where they plan to present greetings from President Chacon to President Portes Gil before returning to their home capital.” 

For more than a century the Royal Aircraft Factory’s B.E.2c has been denigrated as one of the worst aircraft ever made. Even during World War I, when it was on active service with the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the B.E.2c was condemned as a death trap that lacked the speed and maneuverability to evade attack as well as any effective armament with which to defend itself. Although there was some justification for those assessments, critics overlook the fact that the aircraft originated before WWI began, and before those criteria were even considered. In fact, the principal considerations in the B.E.2c’s design were stability, ease of handling and safety, not speed, agility or defensive capability. 

In fairness, the B.E.2c’s negative reputation may be an exaggeration. Much of that stems from the fact that the airplane remained in production and operational long after it clearly had become obsolete. In addition, the Royal Aircraft Factory in general, and the B.E.2c in particular, received negative publicity generated by a segment of the British aircraft industry, particularly by Noel Pemberton-Billing, a vocal member of Parliament and self-proclaimed aviation expert.

The Royal Aircraft Factory (RAF, not to be confused with the Royal Air Force, which wasn’t formed until April 1918) was established at Farnborough in 1906 when the Army Balloon Factory branched into development of heavier-than-air flying machines. Although assigned to create aircraft for the British Army’s newly established Royal Flying Corps, from the outset the institution was more of an experimental and developmental establishment than a production facility. Indeed, despite accusations from the aircraft industry that the British government was unfairly competing against private enterprise, the vast majority of RAF designs, including the B.E.2c, actually were manufactured by private companies rather than by the RAF itself.

The story of the B.E.2c begins with the B.E.1, the airplane from which it derived. The B.E.1 project was supposed to have been simply the repair of a damaged airplane; instead, in 1911 designer Geoffrey de Havilland created an entirely new one. His B.E.1 was a two-seat general purpose tractor biplane, with the “B.E.” signifying “Blériot Experimental.” (To the RAF “B.E.” meant any tractor-type airplane, while pusher airplanes received the designation “F.E.” for “Farman Experimental.”) All that remained of the airplane de Havilland was supposed to repair was the engine, a 60-hp liquid-cooled Wolseley V-8. In December 1911 de Havilland piloted the B.E.1’s first flight himself and he delivered it to the RFC early in 1912. 

The B.E.1 was a two-seat airplane with unstaggered biplane wings and tail surfaces consisting of a fixed airfoil-section horizontal stabilizer ahead of the elevators and a vertical rudder without a fixed vertical stabilizer. The observer sat in front of the pilot and occupied the center of gravity, enabling the aircraft to be flown without any alteration in trim if the observer’s seat was unoccupied. The airframe was wood, with the top and bottom of the fuselage covered with plywood for additional strength. Despite the early date of its design, the B.E.1 included all the characteristics one would currently recognize in an airplane save for the fact that, rather than ailerons, it employed wing warping for lateral control. On March 14, 1912, the B.E.1 became one of the very first aircraft to receive an official Certificate of Airworthiness. 

In February 1912 the B.E.1 was succeeded by the B.E.2, which was almost identical save for the substitution of a 60-hp air-cooled Renault V-8 engine for the B.E.1’s less-than-satisfactory Wolseley. It also became the first standard type of aircraft the RFC adopted for use. In March 1912, less than a month after the B.E.2 entered service, the RAF used it to flight test a newly developed radio transmitter.

Only two B.E.2s were constructed before it was succeeded by the incrementally improved B.E.2a, a total of about 80 of which were manufactured, mostly by Vickers and Bristol. The total number of B.E.2bs manufactured is not certain, however, because many were apparently completed as the later and substantially improved B.E.2c version.

Once the RFC adopted the B.E.2 series for mass-production, the airplane became the subject of a series of experiments conducted by another brilliant young RAF designer and test pilot, Edward Teshmaker Busk. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Busk became interested in perfecting aircraft stability. At the time, the British Army considered stability of vital importance—more than speed or maneuverability—because it wanted well-behaved reconnaissance airplanes in which the pilot could take his hands off the controls while making notes of enemy positions, taking photographs or even operating a radio transmitter. Positive stability was also important because early airplane pilots lacked blind flying instruments and could easily become disoriented in clouds and fall into a spin, something only an experienced pilot could survive.

Busk was both a theoretical and empirical engineer and he tested many ideas, including increasing dihedral, adding stabilizing fins to various parts of the airframe and even installing interplane struts incorporating additional side area. Although he test-flew many of his alterations himself, he also made use of a huge whirling arm, like an enormous centrifuge, to which he attached entire airframes in place of a wind tunnel.

As a result of his research, Busk redesigned the aircraft into the B.E.2c. While resembling earlier versions, this was almost an entirely new design. Not only did Busk add a large fixed vertical stabilizing tail fin, but he replaced the horizontal stabilizer with an entirely new design without the earlier version’s lifting airfoil section. He also revised the mainplanes with a new airfoil shape, new planform, positive stagger and added dihedral. Most noticeably, Busk replaced the old wing warping system with ailerons on all four wings, a change that strengthened the wing structure because the wings no longer needed to be flexible.

Powered either by a 70-hp Renault V-8 or a 90-hp RAF1a, both air-cooled V-8 engines, the B.E.2c could achieve a maximum speed of 72 mph, a ceiling of 10,000 feet and had an endurance of 3½ hours. From the first flight on May 30, 1914, pilots appreciated the B.E.2c’s docile qualities. On June 9, Major William Sefton Brancker flew his B.E.2c for 40 miles without ever having to touch the controls until he reached his destination and began to descend for a landing. Immediately popular with service pilots, the B.E.2c quickly superseded earlier versions of the aircraft on the production lines and was manufactured by no less than 20 aircraft companies. While initially intended for reconnaissance and observation, the aircraft later came to serve as bombers, trainers and even as fighters. 

Edward Busk did not live long enough to enjoy his success. On November 5, 1914, he died when a B.E.2c he was test-flying caught fire in midair and crashed. Although it has never been confirmed, the fire may have been caused by the premature detonation of a new type of incendiary bomb developed by the RAF. Whatever the cause, Britain lost one of its most brilliant and promising engineers and test pilots at the age of 28.

The various B.E.2s may not have been the most warlike of airplanes, but no one could accuse the pilots who flew it of lacking aggressiveness. B.E.2 variants equipped the first RFC squadrons deployed to support the British Expeditionary Force in France. On August 13, 1914, B.E.2a No. 347, flown by Lieutenant Hubert D. Harvey-Kelly, became the first British warplane to fly across the English Channel. Twelve days later Harvey-Kelly and his observer, W.H.C. Mansfield, flew the same B.E.2a to score the first British air-to-air victory—after a fashion—when they attacked a Rumpler Taube with small arms they had brought with them. Forcing the startled Germans to the ground and driving them into the nearby woods for cover, Harvey-Kelly landed and, after collecting souvenirs from the Taube, set it on fire and took off again.

On April 26, 1915, 2nd Lt. William B. Rhodes-Moorhouse flew his B.E.2b into Belgium to drop a 100-pound bomb on the Kortrijk railroad junction. Wounded by ground fire, he managed to return to base and report the success of his mission before going to the hospital, where he died the next day. Rhodes-Moorhouse became the first pilot to receive the Victoria Cross.

After German U-boats began menacing British coastal shipping, the Royal Navy retaliated by ordering a fleet of anti-submarine patrol blimps. Rather than design a control car for the new airships, the Navy simply suspended B.E.2c fuselages beneath the envelopes. The Navy produced 27 “Submarine Scout” airships this way.

When German Zeppelin airships initiated night bombing raids on British cities, the B.E.2c took on a new role as a night interceptor. Although lacking the performance of single-seat scouts, the B.E.2c’s positive stability made it the safest choice for the role of a night fighter in the absence of night-flying instruments. B.E.2cs received credit for shooting down seven Zeppelins. After the first such instance, on the night of September 2-3, 1916, B.E.2c pilot Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson received the Victoria Cross.  

During the first year of the war, few airplanes flew over the front, and they rarely encountered each other in the air. When they did, more often than not they lacked any effective armament with which to attack each other. However, the notorious “Fokker Scourge” against Allied aircraft began as early as July 1915 when the Germans introduced the Fokker Eindecker (monoplane), the first single-seat fighter to be effectively armed with a synchronized forward-firing machine gun. They produced only 416 of them, however, and never had many over the front lines. Moreover, the Eindeckers left a good deal to be desired as fighter planes. Since they relied on wing warping for lateral control, they were not very maneuverable and their wings were relatively thin and fragile. Furthermore, the limited power of available engines and the weight of the machine gun and ammunition meant that they could achieve a maximum speed of only 87 mph. Initially the Eindeckers were not deployed in specialized fighter squadrons but issued piecemeal, a few at a time, to mixed Feldflieger Abteilungen (Field Flying Companies), which operated several different aircraft types suited to perform a variety of aerial missions. As a result, the success of the Eindeckers during 1915 and early 1916 depended on luck and the aerial tactics developed by individual pilots. Even Oswald Boelcke, the most successful German fighter pilot of the first half of WWI, shot down only six Allied aircraft throughout 1915.

Nevertheless, the introduction of armed enemy aircraft highlighted the slow and stable B.E.2c’s vulnerability, transforming its positive qualities into liabilities. Although the British made attempts to install defensive machine guns on the B.E.2c, the observer/gunner’s position in the forward cockpit meant his field of fire was obstructed by the pilot, propeller, wings, struts and bracing wires. The RAF addressed the problem late in 1915 with the R.E.8, a two-seat reconnaissance plane with the observer seated more effectively in the rear with a machine gun. Due to the nature of the British War Office’s procurement system, however, many aircraft manufacturers could not shift production to the R.E.8 until they had fulfilled their B.E.2c contracts. The R.E.8 did not reach squadrons until November 1916, so the B.E.2c had to soldier on far longer than it should have done. By the time the R.E.8 appeared it, too, was becoming outdated, generating even more criticism of the RAF.

Much of that criticism came from Noel Pemberton-Billing. Born Noel Billing in 1881, he adopted the “Pemberton” during a brief stint as an actor. After fighting in the Boer War, he returned to England and became interested in aviation, getting his pilot’s license and launching an aviation company, Pemberton-Billing Ltd., which later became the foundation of the Supermarine company of Spitfire fame after Pemberton-Billing sold his interests. Pemberton-Billing won election to Parliament in 1916 and turned his attention and skills at invective to attack Britain’s aviation establishment. “The Government and its advisors, expert and otherwise, never believed in the reality of the air menace,” he wrote in his 1916 book Air War: How to Wage It. “They sneered at the Zeppelin, they laughed at the aeroplane. Who laughs today? Who pays the price for the work that was not done?” Pemberton-Billing even built a huge and grotesque twin-engine, multi-seat quadraplane, the Supermarine Nighthawk, for intercepting Zeppelins. It proved an abject failure in that role.

The RAF did attempt to address the B.E.2c’s lack of speed by introducing the improved B.E.2e version early in 1916. (The “d” variant was a dual-control training version of the B.E.2c produced in modest numbers.) The B.E.2e featured an entirely new set of unequal-span single-bay wings, similar to the R.E.8’s. The new version had a top speed of 82 mph and the climb rate was slightly better, improvements deemed sufficient to warrant production orders. The dual-control trainer version of the B.E.2e was known as the B.E.2f.

One development of the B.E.2 that has come under a particular degree of unfair criticism was the B.E.12, which many aviation historians have derided as the RAF’s failed attempt to create a single-seat fighter. Actually the B.E.12 first flew in July 1915, long before effective forward-firing armament was available in Britain, and the RAF conceived it as a single-seat bomber and photo-reconnaissance platform. It received a forward-firing machine gun much later, after the perfection of synchronizing mechanisms. Although lacking the maneuverability needed by a front-line fighter, the B.E.12’s excellent stability and forward-firing armament made it a useful home-defense night fighter. One contributed to the destruction of Zeppelin L48 on June 17, 1917.

Although the exact figures are not precisely known, it is estimated that the total production number of all B.E.2 variants was about 3,500, the vast majority being the B.E.2c version. The B.E.2c equipped no less than 72 RFC squadrons and four Navy squadrons. Belgium’s small air service used B.E.2cs and B.E.2ds powered by Hispano-Suiza engines after sensibly modifying theirs to put the pilot up front with a synchronized Vickers machine gun and the observer aft, manning a .303-inch Lewis machine gun on a ring mounting. In August 1918 the U.S. Army Air Service purchased B.E.2es for training purposes. B.E.s served not only over the Western Front but also the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia.  

The B.E.2c was essentially a good airplane that simply outlasted its time but performed as intended until the evolving air war made it obsolete. Its large production, a huge number for such an early airplane, belies the undeserved bad reputation of an airplane that successfully fulfilled a wide variety of military roles all over the world right to the end of World War I.  

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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On December 16, 1945, test pilot Lt. Col. Fred J. Ascani and two friends from his days at West Point took off from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., in an experimental bomber, the Douglas XB-42. The second example built of the unconventional airplane, the XB-42 had set a transcontinental speed record just eight days earlier. Ascani’s flight was supposed to be just a routine test flight, but it proved anything but routine. Within 45 minutes of takeoff, the airplane lay in a crumpled mass in a Maryland field.

The propeller-driven XB-42 Mix-master and its derivative, the jet-powered XB-43 Jetmaster, were two of many experimental military aircraft tested during the 1940s that failed to meet expectations, despite innovative designs. Nonetheless, both aircraft are notable in aviation history. The XB-42 demonstrated new ideas in streamlining, was the first pusher-type bomber to reach the flight-test stage and, most importantly, led directly to the first American jet-powered bomber to be built and tested.

Douglas developed the Mixmaster as a testbed for a high-speed, long-range bombardment airplane with improved performance, and the company intended to use the project for research on reducing drag and providing better propulsion. To do that, the company decided to develop a medium bomber that met specifications from the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), including a top speed of 400 mph at a time when USAAF bombers topped out at roughly 300 mph. When Edward F. Burton, Douglas’s chief of engineering, took charge of the project he began with a “clean sheet of paper” rather than attempting refinements of conventional norms. The result was a unique aircraft.

The design Burton settled on, the Model 459, was a mid-wing, all-metal airplane with laminar-flow wings and pusher propellers in the rear of the fuselage. It had a maximum gross take-off and landing weight of 35,000 pounds and could carry up to 8,000 pounds of bombs. By concealing the engines within the fuselage and placing the props in the rear, the design reduced weight and drag that would have come with wing-mounted engines and their nacelles. Drag was estimated to be 70 percent of that of a conventional twin-engine, tractor-type airplane and the maximum speed for the XB-42 at sea level, with a normal fuel load of 650 pounds and a gross weight of 33,206 pounds, was calculated as 344 mph. At 23,800 feet, the first prototype was projected to peak at 410 mph. Its range at 10,000 feet was 1,840 miles, though a reduction in the standard bomb load along with additional fuel would increase the range up to 5,400 miles.

To power the Mixmaster, Douglas chose a pair of side-by-side mounted Allison V-1710s. The liquid-cooled engines were already being used by airplanes such as the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Each engine had a variable-speed, auxiliary-stage supercharger, automatically controlled by manifold pressure, and turned a coaxial prop. Long shafts extended from the engines to a reduction gear box installed on flexible mounts.

Douglas wanted the props to be independently driven and automatically controlled and to have a reversible pitch feature to shorten the landing distance and prevent too high a speed in a dive. They also wanted the propellers and gear box to be jettisonable so the crew could safely bail out without danger from the rear-mounted propellers. When the XB-42 was in the design stage, no propeller existed with the desired characteristics. The propeller division of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in Caldwell, New Jersey, in conjunction with Acrotorque Company of Stamford, Connecticut, offered a jettisonable “stop gap” propeller system with electric pitch control and a jettison system while working on the desired “ultimate propeller,” though work on it was eventually canceled.

The XB-42’s pusher system was unconventional for a bomber, and so was its defensive armament. Burton gave the airplane a set of rear-facing twin .50-caliber machine guns and placed them along the trailing edges of the wings. This system eliminated the heavy, manned turrets used on bombers already in service. Although the design made provisions for bomb racks and a bomb sight, the equipment was never included in either prototype.

The USAAF bombers then in service had crews of up to 10 people. The proposed B-42 would have only three—a pilot, copilot/gunner and bombardier. They sat in unpressurized compartments, with the pilot and copilot/gunner side-by-side underneath twin “bug-eye” canopies and the bombardier seated ahead of the pilot in a glazed nose section. The twin canopy arrangement made communications between the pilot and copilot difficult, so the second prototype had a conventional single canopy. The copilot could rotate his seat 180 degrees to operate the gun control panel.

In May 1943, Wright Field’s Aircraft Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, affirmed the design as “practical for immediate construction” and recommended building at least two prototypes, initially designated as the XA-42 (“A” signifying “attack”). Once the USAAF approved the mockup, it changed the aircraft’s purpose to that of a bomber and redesignated it the XB-42. Douglas later attached the unofficial name of “Mixmaster” because the propellers reminded people of a popular kitchen mixer manufactured by the Sunbeam company.

The first prototype, serial number 43-50224, made its initial flight on May 6, 1944, in Palm Springs, California. Contractor test pilots made 32 flights that led to numerous adjustments before Douglas turned the airplane over to the USAAF on August 16. One significant problem that Douglas encountered was with engine/propeller vibration but eventually engineers developed a new gear box with shock mounts that reduced it to an acceptable level. The bomb bay doors, when open, created even more vibration, though this was eliminated by adjusting the airflow around them.

The second prototype, serial number 43-50225, became airborne for the first time on August 1, 1944. It was expected to benefit from a lighter airframe. Douglas test pilots flew it for 70 hours before its official turnover to the USAAF in October. Ascani and Captain Glen W. Edwards then flew the airplane for an additional 48 hours, most of it done at Muroc Army Airfield (later renamed for Edwards after he was killed in the crash of the Northrup YB-49). Even with weight-saving reductions, this airplane fell short of its performance targets. It did not meet maximum speed at altitude nor at sea level, or range with guaranteed bomb load. It met the guarantees for rate of climb at sea level, two-engine service ceiling, and take-off and landing distances over a 50-foot obstacle.

Many of the XB-42’s flight characteristics were quite good. Pilots praised its overall stability, maneuverability and stall characteristics. Despite some issues, including poor controllability at low speeds, Ascani enjoyed flying the Mixmaster, noting it was much quieter than conventional prop-driven planes since the propellers were in the rear.

On December 8, 1945, Edwards and Lt. Col. Henry E. Warden flew XB-42 50225 on an attempt to set a transcontinental speed record. They left Long Beach, California, for the 2,295-mile flight to Bolling. The west-to-east flight path took advantage of the 60-mph jet stream, which contributed to the record-setting average speed of 433.6 mph and an elapsed time of 5 hours, 17 minutes, 34 seconds. Accounting for the jet stream, the aircraft’s true average speed was about 375 mph.

Things did not go as smoothly for Ascani and his two friends eight days later. The flight started inauspiciously; after taking off from Bolling, Ascani had to retract the gear with the emergency system. Roughly 40 minutes later, smoke started to fill the cockpit and the instruments showed the engines were overheating. Then both engines quit in quick succession. Ascani ordered his two passengers to bail out, which they did successfully. Just as he was about to jump, Ascani realized he had not jettisoned the props and “had visions of his friends being mangled” as they went plunging through the spinning blades. He triggered the switch that severed the props and the nearly 400-pound gear box. This made a drastic shift in the aircraft’s center of gravity and the XB-42 plunged into a steep dive. Ascani departed the aircraft at an altitude of 400 feet—just high enough for his chute to fully deploy. He landed not far from the place where the Mixmaster fell, at Oxon Hill, Maryland.

The investigation traced the problem with the landing gear to the hydraulic system. The reasons for the engine failures remained unclear, though fuel starvation was suspected as the cause for the right engine’s quitting. The investigation team did not blame Ascani for the crash.

On March 19, 1946, Edwards was making another test flight in the remaining XB-42 when a rod in the left engine separated and exited through the side of the block. Edwards managed to land safely. At this point, the decision was made to cancel the remainder of the planned test schedule for the propeller-driven XB-42. Instead, the Army wanted to supplement the Allison engines with a pair of auxiliary 1,600-pound thrust Westinghouse 19XB-2 jets within under-wing pods. (Adding
jets had been foreseen from the start, so some provisions for them were already present.) Difficulties with the new jet engines, and the fact that demand outstripped supply, resulted in a lengthy delay in getting them, though. 

The jet-powered airplane was redesignated as the XB-42A and flew for the first time on May 27, 1947. By then the maximum gross weight had increased to 44,900 pounds, but while the increased drag induced by the add-on jets was noticeable, the airplane’s top speed rose to 487 mph at 16,700 feet. The fuel-thirsty jets reduced the maximum range to 4,750 miles.

Douglas built the XB-42 without expectation of a production order, but the Army did consider acquiring up to 100 photo-reconnaissance versions of the XB-42A. At the time, only three aircraft under consideration for photo reconnaissance met the requirement for very long range. However, the all-jet XB-43 was then (mistakenly) expected to be available in production quantities in 1945 and was considered a better choice for the task.

Design work on the XB-43 began soon after the XB-42 project got underway. By the time the XB-42 was upgraded to the “A” version, both Jetmasters, serial numbers 44-61508 and 509, had already flown. They were powered by a pair of Allison J35 turbojets that provided a total of 8,000 pounds of thrust, and Douglas promised a maximum speed at sea level of 503 mph, and 453 mph at 35,000 feet. With an 8,000-pound bomb load and a speed of 420 mph at an altitude of 40,700 feet, the range was calculated to be 1,440 miles, though reducing the bomb load to 2,000 pounds would increase range to 2,370 miles at the same speed and altitude. Crew size remained at three, with the navigator-bombardier sitting in the nose section and the pilot and relief pilot sitting side-by-side under separate canopies as with the first XB-42.

Development of the J35 engine had been underway since 1943. Begun by GE and then transferred to Allison, the program had been plagued by technical issues. One of the more extreme failures happened during ground testing when a compressor blade in the right-side engine exploded through the engine casing, injuring a technician and damaging the airframe. The J35 also suffered from oil leaks, turbine wheel problems and other issues before it was finally made airworthy. Engine failures still occurred during some flight tests, however.

At one point, the Army considered purchasing 13 YB-43s and at least 50 production versions. This was before World War II had ended and the Allies wanted jet aircraft that could compete with those of the Luftwaffe. Once the war ended in Europe and the first prototype remained mired in delays, the Army’s interest in the B-43 shifted from possible deployment to research and familiarization. Other jet-powered medium bombers in the design stage, the XB-45, XB-46 and XB-47, showed more promise.

 The XB-43 was well ahead of other bomber projects by the time it first flew on May 17, 1946, with Douglas test pilots Bob Brush and Russell Thaw on board. This flight lasted only eight minutes, reaching an altitude of 1,500 feet and a top speed of 230 mph. The final contractor flight took place on February 20, 1947, with Brush and James Little as the crew. Further test flights revealed the XB-43 was capable of fulfilling or even exceeding the performance specifications Douglas had guaranteed, with the exception of take-off and landing distances. The plane’s top speed was found to be 515 mph at 5,000 feet at 32,000 pounds gross weight.

The XB-43 still had issues to overcome, though. One of them involved its plexiglass. On the 12th test flight the XB-43 reached 35,000 feet, but the canopies cracked at the high altitude, forcing a redesign. Low temperatures or sudden temperature changes affected the plexiglass nose panels the same way. The problem forced the program to restrict the altitude to 20,000 feet. Finally, engineers reworked the aircraft’s nose using mostly plywood. Pilots also complained that the right canopy obscured their view, so any future B-43s would have received a single, large canopy unit as the second XB-42 had. Additional issues with the Jetmaster included stability problems at high speed and limited center of gravity range. Its unusual characteristics made it necessary to be cautious when instructing pilots how to fly it.

After a lengthy delay for the installation of revised engines, the second aircraft, designated YB-43 (with the “Y” designating a pre-production aircraft), finally made its first flight on May 15, 1947, with Russell Thaw as pilot. This aircraft was transferred to Muroc about 11 months later. After completion of its test flights, the aircraft was assigned to the AMC Power Plant Laboratory to conduct tests with the new GE J47 axial flow jet engine.

The first XB-43 retired from flight testing after becoming damaged in February 1951, and it became a source of spare parts for the remainder of the YB-43 test program. Ultimately, the first prototype, like many surplus and obsolete aircraft, was destroyed as a ground test target for training. The second YB-43 continued to fly until December 1953, when it finally retired with over 300 hours of flight time.

The Air Force donated the XB-42A and YB-43 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1949 and 1954, respectively. In 2010 both were transferred to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. They now sit side-by-side in the museum’s restoration facility, though neither is currently scheduled for restoration work.

If the XB-42’s test program had somehow progressed at a significantly faster rate, then perhaps a few photo-reconnaissance versions might have flown missions over Japanese territory in the closing weeks of World War II. Faster development of jet engines would probably have resulted in some limited production of the B-43. History did not happen that way, so neither aircraft became a “crate of thunder” for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Instead, they remain quirky examples of an aircraft that had one wing in the propeller era and another in the jet age. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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At 2:10 p.m. on October 10, 1933, Emil Smith sent a telegram to the aunt with whom he lived in Chicago. “Leaving New York today by plane,” it read. “Everything O.K.” Approximately two hours later, Smith boarded United Air Lines Trip 23 in Newark, New Jersey. The twin-engine Boeing 247, tail number 13304, was headed to Cleveland, where it would refuel and take on a new crew of pilots. Then it was on to Chicago, and from there to the airplane’s final destination of Oakland. Smith had a ticket for Chicago and he carried a small package, wrapped in brown paper, that he kept close to him over the next few hours—the final hours of his life.

Smith and his fellow passengers never made it to Chicago. Just before 9:00 p.m., United Air Lines Trip 23 exploded over Chesterton, Indiana, as it approached Chicago’s Municipal Airport, killing all seven people aboard. Considered the first time a bomb had destroyed a commercial airline flight, the crash became the subject of an intense investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the FBI). Overseen by director J. Edgar Hoover and led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis (who would later gain fame leading the manhunts for gangsters George “Baby Face” Nelson, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd and John Dillinger), agents interviewed hundreds of people from Newark and New York to San Francisco. The interviewees even included a young, up-and-coming attorney who would twice win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president two decades later.

Theories for the crash included tail flutter, a meteor strike, a faulty fuel line and sabotage by a disgruntled United pilot upset about the contentious negotiations between the pilots and the airline for increased pay. Those theories fell by the wayside once forensic analysis of the wreckage determined the real cause of the crash: a “high explosive” bomb had exploded near the rear of the airplane, ripping the Boeing in half. Emil Smith soon emerged as the prime suspect. What was in the package he clung to so tightly? Why was he in New York?

As time passed and every lead led to a dead end, Hoover grew increasingly frustrated. His agents eventually compiled a report that exceeded 300 pages (and was declassified by the FBI in 2017). No arrests were ever made and, 90 years later, the bombing of United Air Lines Trip 23 remains one of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries. 

Joe Groff said he was “dealing in a game of hearts with some neighboring farmers shortly before 9 o’clock last night when we heard an explosion,” according to United Press story from October 11, 1933. Groff ran to a window and “saw a big airplane coming down. Flames appeared to be shooting out from it.”

Groff and the other card-playing farmers ran toward the Boeing 247. The wreckage was engulfed in flames that leaped 100 feet high into the night sky. “We stood there in the rain and watched, helpless,” Groff said. “There was nothing we could do. There was no sign of life about the plane.” The airplane continued to burn for more than two hours.

Fred Rhode had a farm nearby. He too ran toward the crash site “but you couldn’t get near the wreckage, the heat was so bad,” he told the Times newspaper of Hammond, Indiana. Hundreds of pieces of the fuselage were scattered across a field and, according to the Times, “one of the charred victims, a woman, was decapitated. Arms and legs, now only burned stumps, added a gruesome touch to the tragedy.”

The initial explosion split the airplane in two and “the tail section of the plane fell about one-half mile from the scene of the crash, almost intact,” according to United Air Lines Vice President D.B. Colyer. He said the plane was traveling at about 150 miles per hour when it hit the ground, igniting the remaining gasoline in the airplane’s tanks. “He believes that the impact burst the gasoline tanks and the heat from the fire caused the air in the tires of the wheels to explode,” agents reported. (Colyer theorized that “gasoline escaping from the feed lines may have flowed along the metal body of the plane to the rear section, where it attained a mixture of air and was explosed [sic] by ignition or friction.”)

The bodies of pilot Richard Tarrant and copilot A.T. Ruby were found near the airplane’s main section. The bodies of stewardess Alice Scribner and passengers Dorothy Dwyer and Fred Schendorf were badly burned and found in the wreckage of the cabin. 

Dwyer had been scheduled to take an earlier flight from Newark, with a final destination in Reno, Nevada, where she had planned to marry Stanley Baldwin. However, Dwyer missed her connecting flight from Boston and “for this reason she was on the plane that left at 4:30 p.m.,” according to the Bureau of Investigation report. Scribner, a nurse (a qualification to be a stewardess at the time) had recently been hired by United. Her fiancé, Evan Terp, was waiting for her at the airport in Chicago. Schendorf was a businessman from Chicago.

The bodies of Smith and Warren Burris weren’t found until daybreak the following morning, in the weeds about half a mile from the main section of the plane. They had either been blown out of the plane after the explosion or had jumped. Burris was a United employee who was being shuttled from Cleveland to Chicago.

People came from miles around to view the crash, and several picked up pieces of the airplane or its contents as souvenirs. “Mr. Purvis further advised that the Agents are trying to collect parts of the plane picked up by souvenir hunters,” Hoover wrote on October 13. 

A day after the crash, United issued a statement reported in the New York Post: “The accident marked the first passenger fatality in a multi-motored plane in the United Air Lines’ experience. The company has flown approximately 40,000,000 miles with multi-motored planes, without previous passenger fatalities. We are strongly of the opinion that the plane did not explode in the air….”

Inspectors with the Aeronautic Branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce told agents a phenomenon called “tail flutter” could have been responsible for the airplane splitting in two. They described it as a vibration of the tail that eventually “wears down the resistance of the body until finally at the time of some strain these parts disintegrate.” There was a precedent for the flutter theory. Back on March 31, 1931, a Transcontinental and Western Air Fokker F-10 had crashed near Bazaar, Kansas, killing all eight people aboard, including legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. Investigators were able to determine that a spar in the plane’s all-wooden wings had broken. This created uncontrolled flutter in the wing, which caused one of the wings to tear away from the body of the aircraft.

Forensic science was still in its early stages in 1933 and the Bureau of Investigation did not have its own agents trained in this emerging field. It brought in investigators from the Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University in Chicago to examine the wreckage. In a letter dated October 14, the laboratory’s Dr. C.W. Muehlberger wrote, in his initial report to Purvis, that the cause of the crash was an explosion produced by “a ‘high explosive’ of the type of nitroglycerin, dynamite of high percentage strength, TNT, or some similar substance.” He said the explosion occurred toward the airplane’s rear, in the upper portion of the lavatory or in the blanket compartment built into an upper section of the bathroom compartment. The opening to the blanket compartment was in the rear of main cabin.

Now that agents knew the cause of the explosion, they began to focus on finding out who placed it aboard the plane, their motive and how the bomb was detonated. The answers to these questions proved elusive.

Smith and his package immediately aroused suspicions. He had been in New York in the days before the crash, ensconced at the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street and Madison Avenue. Family members in Chicago reported he was in New York to watch the World Series. The Giants had beaten the Washington Senators in five games, with the series-clinching game on October 7 taking place at Griffith Stadium in Washington. There was no evidence Smith attended either of the games played at the Polo Grounds in New York on October 3 and 4, nor was a definitive timeline established on when he arrived in the city and what he did there. 

Baggage handlers placed his luggage in the forward baggage compartment and Smith carried his package onto the plane. When the plane stopped to refuel in Cleveland, he initially didn’t want to leave his seat. A passenger agent “instructed Miss Scribner to inform Smith that he should leave the plane while it refueled” and also reported that Smith removed the package from the “parcel holder over his head” and carried it with him as he walked through the Cleveland airport. Informed that Smith had attempted to carry a bottle of liquor aboard the flight in Newark, the passenger agent tried to determine if he was drunk. “Smith seemed entirely sober and normal and no liquor could be smelled on his breath or about his person,” the agent reported.

Agents explored every aspect of Smith’s seemingly ordinary life. An Army veteran who been stationed in Hawaii during World War I, Smith, 44, lived with his aunt, Anna Reidl, on Argyle Street in Chicago. He was a bachelor and had owned and operated a grocery business with Reidl until they sold it in 1930. Smith was “comfortably situated” after the sale and spent his time hunting, fishing and attending baseball games. Reidl told agents Smith lived with her because “his people” didn’t approve of his idle ways and wanted him to find a job. Reidl described her nephew as “very quiet” and said he would “often come in the evenings and play pinochle with her, or would take her on hunting trips with him.”

According to United employees interviewed by agents, Smith took a pint bottle of liquor out of his bag at the Newark airport. He was about to take a drink when a porter advised him it was not allowed. “Smith reluctantly replaced the bottle in the handbag,” the porter said. Then Smith went to the bathroom, leaving his bag on a chair in the waiting room. When he returned from the bathroom, Smith “opened the bag and extracted therefrom a package wrapped in brown paper, which he stated…he would carry.” The package was “about the ordinary length of a shoe.” 

Prohibition was still in effect, and Purvis received a tip that Smith had been in New York in connection with a “rum boat” and had been heard to say that if “this deal went through he would be fixed for life.” However, no evidence was ever found connecting Smith with bootleggers in New York.

On October 9, Smith bought a $47.95 ticket for the flights from Newark to Cleveland and on to Chicago at the ticket desk in his hotel. He also purchased a flight insurance policy for $2. It was good for the day only and would have paid $10,000 to Smith’s estate. 

Robert Dawson was the United pilot who flew the plane from Newark to Cleveland. He told agents that about 30 minutes before landing, he had walked back into the cabin and talked to Smith, who was sitting in Seat No. 3. “He asked Smith how he was enjoying the trip and Smith replied that he was enjoying it very much.”

United’s D.B. Colyer revised his opinion and said that an explosion in the air had indeed caused the crash and he pointed the finger at Smith. He told agents that “Smith may have been carrying some explosive in the form of nitro-glycerine.” 

Eventually the investigation concluded that Smith “was a reputable citizen.” They could not establish a motive or find evidence that he had carried a bomb onto the airplane.

Agents across the country explored every possible lead and theory.

A United Press reporter called an agent and said he’d received information the crash was an attempt to “get” Joseph Keenan, an assistant attorney general with the U.S. Department of Justice who was investigating organized crime. Keenan had flown with United a few days before the crash. “I did not see how this rumor could have any truth,” the agent wrote.

On November 3, 1933, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a story titled “Hunt Gangster for Murder of Seven in Plane.” The article claimed that agents of the Department of Justice “expect soon to arrest a gangster and charge him,” although “the identity of the gangster was not disclosed.” Purvis reported to Hoover that the story was “made up by the newspaper.”

Several agents investigated the possibility that a disgruntled pilot was responsible. A United vice president said he had been informed indirectly that if the airline used “scab” pilots during the dispute “they would find their planes would be damaged.” The brother of copilot A.T. Ruby told agents his brother “had been having a great deal of trouble with certain individuals who were members of the Pilot’s Union.” Agents in the Detroit office of the Bureau of Investigation interviewed Wharton Larned, the United pilot who had allegedly threatened Ruby. Larned “answered all questions frankly and apparently honestly,” agents reported, and he was ruled out as a suspect. Agents also determined that by the time of the crash “all talk of a strike had blown over and there was no indication of dissatisfaction of any employees or pilots….” No evidence of sabotage by a United employee was found. Another dead end.

The Bureau’s Chicago office even received a letter from an employee of an Argentinian importing and exporting company based in Cleveland suggesting that a meteor had struck the airplane. The letter said that meteors “travelling in the upper space at velocities approaching 30 miles per second in reaching the atmosphere are heated by friction to about 3500 degrees C.…” The Bureau ruled out meteors. 

Several passengers on United flights in the days preceding the crash of the Trip 23 flight were interviewed to determine if they had observed any suspicious activities. One of these passengers was Adlai Stevenson, then the chief attorney with the Federal Alcohol Control Administration. He had flown from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland and then Chicago on October 8. “Mr. Stevenson stated that he did not notice anything out of the ordinary on his trip…and that the plane carried eight or ten passengers, besides the two pilots and the hostess.” Decades later, Stevenson would run as the Democratic candidate for president, losing both times to Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

The investigation continued into 1934. Lead after lead went nowhere. “I think that this investigation should continue and the facts be presented to the proper U.S. Attorney,” assistant attorney general Keenan wrote on January 17 in a memorandum to Hoover. By the end of the year the investigation appeared hopelessly stalled. On December 12, Purvis wrote to Hoover that “further interviews with other passengers will reveal no new additional information beneficial to the investigation, and authority is requested, therefore, to close this case in the files of the Chicago office.”

Hoover wrote back, telling Purvis he “desires that a careful review of the file in this case be made and leads set out, with the view of developing further facts pertinent to this investigation.” Hoover sent similar letters to agents in other offices. 

Agents in the San Francisco office interviewed J.J. Lavin, an American working for the Chinese Consul in San Francisco who helped oversee the delivery to China of wheat purchased in the United States. He had been scheduled to fly on the ill-fated flight but rescheduled to a later one. Lavin had been overheard saying a bomb caused the crash, supposedly before this information had been reported in newspapers. Lavin told the agents that “he does not recall discussing the matter with anyone, although [he] admitted while under the influence of liquor he may possibly have discussed the matter with various people.”

The investigation continued well into 1935 without any breakthroughs.

On September 20, 1935, Hoover sent a memorandum to Keenan. All “undeveloped leads in this case have been exhausted, and the investigation has not developed any facts which would justify presenting this matter to the United States Attorney. Therefore, this case is being closed.” The crash of United Air Lines Trip 23 remains unsolved. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Around 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 14, 1906, Washington, D.C., residents spotted an oblong shape floating across the Potomac River toward the city. The thing was immense—62 feet long, 16 feet in diameter—larger than any familiar moving object except a locomotive, with a golden sheen that glowed in the morning sun. A noisy gasoline engine drove a propeller at the nose pulling the object along. A man on a platform hanging from the rig somehow was steering the airborne conveyance.

The mysterious craft sailed up the National Mall and landed near the Washington Monument. The occupant stepped off the platform. His name was Lincoln Beachey, he said. He was a dirigible pilot, and he had taken off that morning from a new amusement park in Arlington, Va., where dirigibles were among the attractions. His destination was the White House; he had paused to make a repair. He deliberately lingered on the Monument grounds to let word spread of his airship’s presence. A crowd formed and swelled. Soon, “the drives were lined with grocery wagons, laundry wagons, automobiles, bicycles and other kinds of vehicles and the east side of the Monument was black with a mass of humanity,” The Washington Post reported. Beachey stepped back aboard, fired up the engine, and took off, circling the Monument before heading toward the White House, three blocks north.

Dirigibles descended from hot-air balloons. Brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier pioneered the first piloted balloon ascent over Paris in 1783. Union and Confederate forces used balloons for reconnaissance and fire control in the 1860s. But these early gasbags had to remain tethered lest the breeze carry them off. Dirigibles, introduced in the late 1600s but not practicable until nearly two centuries later, were rigid, herring-shaped, and self-propelled. To build a dirigible, artisans bolted together a wooden frame, usually of pine or spruce, over which they stretched a thin, tough skin of high-quality Japanese silk, tightly sewn and made airtight with coatings of oil or varnish.

Netting helped maintain the rigid shape. Hydrogen, a gas lighter than air, gave the ungainly airships buoyancy. Operators usually generated their own hydrogen by pouring sulfuric acid over barrels of iron filings and piping the resulting hydrogen into their airships to inflate them. Ropes held the airship in place until an “aeronaut” had mounted a wooden platform slung beneath the craft and tethered by wires and poles of bamboo, wood, or metal. The platform held a gasoline engine that drove a propeller below the aircraft’s nose.

Once untethered and on his way, the pilot controlled his craft—dirigible is derived from the French diriger, meaning “to steer”—using a large wooden rudder aft of the platform, in effect sailing on air. He controlled pitch—the angle of rise or descent—by walking forward and back on the platform. A successful dirigible pilot was hearty, daring, and willing to risk falling out of the sky to his death.

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Experimenters worked their way through steam engines—too heavy—and battery-powered electric motors—unreliable—before settling on gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont started building reliable dirigibles in 1898 and in 1901 famously circumnavigated the Eiffel Tower. German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched a version in 1900. The dirigible entered American popular culture as entertainment. One of the first successful airship builders, Thomas Baldwin, started out at 21 as a circus acrobat and trapeze performer. Bitten by the urge to fly, he got onto the county-fair circuit piloting hot-air balloons and in 1885 became the first American to parachute from a balloon gondola.

Designating himself “Captain Tom,” Baldwin began building dirigibles at his shop in San Francisco in 1903. Available engines proved too weak. In 1904, an unfamiliar make of motorcycle zipped past his shop. Baldwin investigated and learned that the two-wheeler ran on a powerful but lightweight four-cylinder gas engine built by Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, N.Y. Baldwin ordered a Curtiss engine by telegraph, mounted it on his airship, rigged a drive train to a propeller, and took to the air.

Dirigible operators transported their craft by rail, for each appearance breaking down and rebuilding the entire assembly to fit into a boxcar. Bookings focused on fairs, expositions, and amusement parks—settings that drew sizable crowds over several days, weeks, even months. In October 1904, Baldwin took his Curtiss-powered dirigible, California Arrow, to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Finding himself too heavy for his airship, he deputized skinny employee Roy Knabenshue, an experienced balloonist, to take it up. Navigating in lazy circles over the fairgrounds, Knabenshue astonished onlookers and landed safely. California Arrow was the first successful dirigible in the United States.

Baldwin set about building a fleet of dirigibles using five-horsepower Curtiss engines. He was hunting for additional hands when a youth came by in March 1905 seeking work. Growing up nearby in San Francisco, 18-year-old Lincoln Beachey had raced bicycles and motorcycles, in the process becoming an adept mechanic. Baldwin put Beachey on his ground crew. In 1905 Roy Knabenshue went home to Toledo, Ohio, to build his own dirigibles. That August, aboard Toledo II, Knabenshue departed New York’s Central Park and soared above Manhattan’s skyscrapers, putting dirigible flying on the map.

Knabenshue’s exit left Baldwin short a pilot. Beachey, compact, athletic and eager, fit the bill. He proved deft at piloting airships at county fairs and other events but, itching for more pay than Baldwin was offering, joined Knabenshue. The two worked the seasonal exhibition circuit. In June 1906, they contracted to fly at Luna Park, a new amusement park in Cleveland. One show Beachey was at 500 feet when two bamboo platform spars failed. The pilot’s platform buckled, shoving the propeller into and through the airship’s skin. The deflating dirigible dropped slowly. Beachey, woozy from inhaling hydrogen, hung on until he was about 20 feet from the ground and jumped, hitting the dirt unconscious but quickly reviving.

The Cleveland operation was part of a growing chain. Knabenshue landed a contract with a new branch in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. “The new Coney Island,” as Washingtonians were already calling their Luna Park franchise, featured a roller coaster, a ballroom, a theater, restaurants, and an arena big enough to accommodate elephant shows and circuses. Besides its bill of concerts, dances, and extravaganzas, the park quickly became a popular setting for company picnics and amateur athletic events. An advertisement in the June 7, 1906, Washington Post urged readers to “KEEP YOUR EYE ON KNABENSHUE’S AIRSHIP June 12 to 18.” As part of his ballyhoo, the aviator told reporters he might just fly across the Potomac, land on the White House roof, and deliver a message to President Theodore Roosevelt. People scoffed. No airship had ever flown into Washington, D.C.

Beachey lobbied to make the trans-Potomac flight. He had proven a capable, daring stunt flyer and coverage of his recent misadventure in Cleveland had lent his name notoriety. If Beachey came to grief, Knabenshue reasoned, he could blame pilot error. If Beachey succeeded, their Luna Park stand stood to sell out. Knabenshue told his protégé yes and boarded a train to appear in Buffalo, where he flew in another dirigible and wound up in Lake Erie but was fished out unhurt. On June 14, Beachey inflated his airship, performed his pre-flight check, revved the Curtiss craft, and, just after 10:00 a.m., took off.

After his theatrical pause at the Washington Monument, Beachey landed at the south edge of the executive mansion’s lawn. Another crowd gathered. Gawkers jumped the low picket fence that constituted the security perimeter. President Roosevelt was two miles away, giving the annual commencement address at Georgetown University (“Don’t flinch, don’t foul and hit the line hard,” he was exhorting the graduates about the time Beachey came calling). First Lady Edith Roosevelt emerged, chatted with the pilot, and examined his dirigible. “That fellow is only seeking an advertisement,” Presidential secretary William Loeb, irked by the spectacle of an airship drawing a crowd so close to the White House, told an assistant. “He has no invitation or permit to come here.” Police shooed onlookers and told Beachey to take off. He insisted on giving Loeb a letter for the president. The message is lost to history; Loeb may have thrown it away.

Beachey took off, banking east over the Treasury Building and following Pennsylvania Avenue NW toward the Capitol. He kept his altitude low, 150 to 500 feet, to give spectators a good look. “Business in Washington was practically at a standstill,” a newspaper reported. “The streets were filled with people, the roofs of houses were covered with them and heads were protruding from every available window, all craning their necks upward to get a glimpse of the aeronaut.”

The unfamiliar sound of an engine putt-putting in mid-air and the sight of a dirigible closing on the Capitol disrupted congressional deliberations. A stampede of senators, representatives and civil servants piled outside to watch the contraption land near the Capitol’s east steps. “I guess I am about the only private individual who has ever stopped Congressional legislation,” Beachey quipped later.

Newsmen and Washingtonians of all sorts came to gape as Beachey held forth. The flight would open a new era in aerial history, he predicted. Beachey asked for volunteers to hold his machine in place and, fuel can in hand, went for gasoline. Returning, he gassed up, bounded onto the airship’s catwalk, and started the engine. Taking off, he circled the Capitol dome and flew back to Luna Park. The calm, capable “Boy Aeronaut” became an instant celebrity. The dirigible landing was the talk of the capital. “White House and Capitol Upset by an Airship,” a headline read. “Sky Pilot Soars Over City, Thousands Staring,” blared another. Witnesses took to wearing typewritten labels on their lapels that read “I Saw It!”

Beachey took fame in stride. “It was the easiest flight I have ever made,” he told reporters. “The air was just calm enough, the sights were beautiful, and everyone I saw had on a pleasant smile and a mouthful of cheers. Washington looks like a huge flower garden full of block houses and bugs as seen from the sky. The question of navigating is no longer an experiment. I can go to breakfast in my airship.”

Beachey performed for overflow crowds for the rest of the engagement at Luna Park. He soon went solo, setting records for speed and maneuvers. Winning races and mastering stunts, Beachey was soon recognized as America’s best dirigible flyer. In June 1907, he took off from seaside Revere, Mass., flew into Boston, and landed on Boston Common to cheers. Airborne again, he circled the State House’s golden dome. Over Massachusetts Bay his engine quit; fishermen rushed to his rescue and towed his craft to shore. “The distance from the earth did not cause me the least worry,” he said. “It is a hard place to adjust a cranky motor.”

Later that month, he performed at newly opened Happyland Amusement Park on Staten Island, N.Y. To promote his show, he bombarded Fort Wadsworth, nearby on Staten Island, with balls filled with passes to the park. He flew over Brooklyn, then Manhattan, landing at Battery Park. As usual, a crowd materialized. Police dispersed the onlookers and ordered Beachey to fly off. He vowed to land atop the 20-story Flatiron Building, but a propeller malfunction and uncooperative gusts dumped him into the East River. Boaters fetched him and his aircraft. Soon Beachey was back at Luna Park in Arlington. At the Washington Post’s behest, he flew to the capital, dropped passes to the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Norfolk, Va., again circled the Washington Monument, landed near the Post building, and returned to Luna Park.

“There’s really nothing to it,” he told a newsman. “It’s just the same as being on the ground so far as nervousness is concerned. I stand on this two-inch [thick] beam along the underside of the framework…and think nothing whatever about being 2,000 feet in the air. It’s just as safe up there as it is down here if you don’t get scared, and scared people have no business in an airship.” Beachey stuck with dirigibles until he worked an air meet in Los Angeles in 1910. Among the aircraft on hand was a fixed-wing biplane. “Boy, our racket is dead!” he told a pal.

He was right. In 1903, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had gotten a fixed-wing aircraft aloft and soon went into biplane production. Mechanical genius Glenn Curtiss was installing his motorcycle and dirigible engines into biplanes he designed and built. On July 4, 1908, Curtiss made the first public flight sanctioned by a professional association. Two years later, he pioneered a flight from Albany to New York City. The Wrights sued, claiming he was infringing on their patent.

Curtiss, determined to prove that his airplanes stood apart from and surpassed the Wrights and other competitors, started the Curtiss Exhibition Team, in 1911 hiring the nation’s leading aeronaut, Lincoln Beachey. Beachey cracked up his first Curtiss biplane, but quickly mastered the machine. He set speed records, was the first American to loop the loop, and flew upside down. After a flight over Niagara Falls, he swooped back under the bridge across the river. He learned to combine fast climbs followed by vertical plunges that he called “Death Dips,” pulling up at the last second. He partnered on tour with famed race-car driver Barney Oldfield, flying low over Oldfield’s head as the racer steered around dirt tracks, sometimes nudging Oldfield’s hat off with a tire. At Yale University, he dropped baseballs from his plane while the Yale catcher tried to snag them. Other flyers attempted to copy Beachey’s moves but none came close and a few crashed trying. “Beachey is the most wonderful flyer I ever saw,” Wilbur Wright said.

In May 1911, back in Washington, D.C., flying a Curtiss plane in an aerial competition at Benning Race Track, Beachey left the pack to head downtown. He circled the Capitol dome, then flew over the city in swirling winds. “Five years ago, I satisfied a strong desire to circle the Capitol in a dirigible and since that time I have always wanted to do so in an aeroplane,” he told newsmen afterward. “The Capitol loomed in the distance and I could not withstand the temptation.”

Beachey was back again in September 1914, this time announcing his flight beforehand. He circled the Capitol, looped the loop three times, flew upside down, and sailed over the White House as president Woodrow Wilson watched from an upstairs window. His purpose, Beachey said, was “to bring America first in things aeronautic” and demonstrate airplanes’ military potential. The event’s excitement was marred slightly by what may have been the first mid-air collision: his plane struck and killed a carrier pigeon.

Beachey’s luck ran out on March 14, 1915. He had parted with Curtiss, put biplanes behind, and was flying a flashy single-wing aircraft of his own design. At a San Francisco airshow, after looping and flying upside down at high speed, he dove sharply, eliciting cheers and gasps that turned into screams when his aircraft’s wings broke off and his plane plunged into San Francisco Bay. “The Daredevil of the Air” was dead at 28.

Curtiss had won a contract to build planes for the U.S. Navy; the Wrights and others were building planes for the Army. World War I accelerated aircraft development, including the use of dirigibles and planes to drop bombs. In Washington, the capital’s vulnerability from the air became clear. The city no longer welcomed airborne daredevils and, over the years, layers of municipal and federal regulation restricted and controlled the capital airspace. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a “flight restricted zone” excluded aircraft lacking Federal Aviation Administration authorization from entering DC’s airspace. Anyone trying to fly an aircraft to the White House would be chased by military jets or downed by anti-aircraft fire—a far cry from that tranquil day in 1906 when Lincoln Beachey alighted in the White House yard.

Dr. Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, N.Y. SUNY Press published the second edition of his book The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History which includes a chapter on Glenn Curtiss, and his newest book, The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era, in 2022.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Roald Dahl was not an admirer of the Gloster Gladiator. “They have taut canvas wings, covered with magnificently inflammable dope, and underneath there are hundreds of small thin sticks, the kind you put under the logs for kindling, only these are drier and thinner,” wrote Dahl, the British novelist and short-story writer, creator of Willy Wonka and a Gloster Gladiator pilot himself. “If a clever man said, ‘I am going to build a big thing that will burn better and quicker than anything else in the world,’ and if he applied himself diligently to his task, he would probably finish up by building something very like a Gladiator.”

Dahl’s understanding of his airplane’s structure was lacking, since its wings were all metal, but he nearly died in a flaming crash of his own Gladiator in the North African desert, so we’ll give him some leeway.

The Gladiator—it had no nickname, was never called the Gladdy or the Blazing Breadbox—was the last British biplane fighter, an anomaly that the Air Ministry clung to out of both necessity and romanticism. As an aerobatic plaything for the finest flying club in the world—the boys of the RAF’s Volunteer Reserve prewar university squadrons at Cambridge and Oxford—there was no lovelier airplane.

In the 1930s, the RAF was lumbered with slow, draggy, open-cockpit biplane fighters like the Hawker Fury and Bristol Bulldog, which could trace their lineage to World War I. But relief was in sight: already under development were “the monoplane fighters,” which we now know as the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. They were a reaction to the threat of what would become one of the finest piston-engine fighters of all time—Germany’s Messerschmitt Me-109. But “development” was another way of saying, “maybe next year…or two.” Something was needed in the interim. 

The company that built the Gladiator was called Gloster. (Initially it was the Gloucester-shire Aircraft Company, until the Brits found that foreigners were pronouncing it “Glau-cess-der-shyer.” So they invented the briefer phonetic title.) It seems odd that Gloster created something so antediluvian as the Gladiator, for its very next design was the first British jet, the tubby little E28/39 Whittle-engine testbed. After that Gloster designed the only RAF jet to see combat in World War II, the Meteor.

The Gladiator’s designer was engineer Henry Philip Folland, who would eventually found his own aircraft company, best known today for the Folland Gnat light fighter and trainer that once served with the RAF Red Arrows display team. Folland had been the lead designer of the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5, which was so fast and successful in combat that it is sometimes called the Spitfire of World War I. He went on to design several of the Gladiator’s predecessors—the Grebe, Gamecock and Gauntlet. With his Schneider Trophy contender, the Gloster IV float biplane, he acquired a reputation as a drag-deleting expert. With the Glad-iator, Folland brought the biplane fighter to the pinnacle of prewar excellence.

In 1930, the Air Ministry had issued a specification—what the U.S. would call a request for proposals—and they got a dozen relatively advanced biplane candidates, at least on paper. Unfortunately, the spec had urged the use of the Rolls-Royce Goshawk engine, a V-12 design that used evaporative cooling rather than straightforward liquid cooling. The theory was that having an engine turn its coolant into steam removed more heat than simply having it make hot water hotter. Maybe so, but the Goshawk turned out to be a lousy engine. For one thing, the cooling system didn’t work during high-G maneuvers. Nor did it help that steam cooling required a large condensing radiator atop the upper wing to turn the steam back into liquid. If a single rifle-caliber round punctured that, it could easily down the airplane.

Gloster had wisely steered clear of the Goshawk and instead worked on a private venture, upgrading its already-successful Gauntlet biplane fighter. The Gauntlet had a Bristol Jupiter nine-cylinder radial, but Bristol did a bit of engineering and turned the Jupiter into the very successful Mercury engine by shortening its stroke an inch and thus reducing the circumference of the engine, meaning less frontal-area drag. It also meant less power, but Bristol dealt with that by doing an unusual thing. Super-charged aircraft engines use their blowers to maintain sea-level power as altitude increases, but Bristol decided to give the Mercury some extra power by ground-boosting it—tuning the supercharger to work even at sea level. The Mercury also had four valves per cylinder—unusual for a radial.

In an attempt to reach the 250-mph top speed then beloved of the Air Ministry, Gloster strengthened the main spars and changed the biplane configuration from a two-bay design—two sets of interplane struts on each side of the fuselage—to a single-bay configuration. Eliminating four big struts and their yards of cables and rigging cleaned up the airplane substantially, as did simplifying the draggy landing gear. Straightforward Stearman-like Dowty dampers enclosed in nicely faired wooden legs were far cleaner than the multi-strutted Gauntlet design.

The one thing that clearly turned a Gauntlet into a Gladiator, however, was a fully enclosed cockpit with a sliding canopy—the first on any RAF fighter. Yet many photos of Gladiators in flight show that canopy slid wide open. Like early airline pilots who decried the Ford Trimotor because its enclosed cockpit kept them from feeling the wind on their cheeks (which is how, they claimed, it was possible to make coordinated turns), experienced RAF pilots felt constrained by a canopy. It limited their visibility, they said, and insulated them from their proper milieu. One Gladiator pilot claimed that he had tracked a bogey for miles before realizing that it was a fly strolling around the inside of his canopy. Nor did it help that a Gladiator’s cockpit often filled with engine fumes that needed to be blown away.

The canopy wasn’t the only Gladiator innovation that met with disapproval. The big biplane was the first British fighter to utilize flaps, though they were intended solely for landing. They were small but deployed from both sets of wings, so their total area was meaningful. Many old-timers wouldn’t touch them, complaining that they upset the airplane’s trim. Perhaps they felt that using the big pitch-trim wheel just to the left of the pilot’s seat was not their job.

The Gladiator prototype flew in September 1934 but did not enter service with the RAF until early 1937, and by then the RAF had already ordered its first Hurricanes, signaling the biplane’s impending obsolescence. Those early Mk.I Gladiators came armed with World War I Vickers and Lewis machine guns—two of the former in the fuselage sidewalls firing through the prop, plus a Lewis under each lower wing. The old .303-caliber popguns often jammed the instant the trigger was activated. Savvy Gladiator pilots carried rubber mallets with which to pound on the Vickers breeches, which extended back into the cockpit.

Why did aircraft guns jam so often back then? There were many reasons, but perhaps the most meaningful one is that machine guns were designed to operate in an upright, stable, 1G ground environment, often carefully belt-fed by second gunner. Bolt them onto a vibrating, cavorting, G-loaded airplane, and all of the finely machined sliding and rotating parts inside the breech get minutely twisted and racked by an airplane’s maneuvers and position. Nobody designed those guns to fire upside-down or sideways. A partial solution was to replace all four British guns with somewhat more modern Colt Brownings manufactured under license by Birmingham Small Arms, the company that went on to produce the classic BSA motorcycles of the 1950s.

The guns “actually fired bullets through the revolving propeller,” marveled Roald Dahl. “To me, this was about the greatest piece of magic I had ever seen in my life. I could simply not understand how two machine guns firing thousands of bullets could be synchronized to fire their bullets through a propeller revolving at thousands of revs a minute without hitting the propeller blades. I was told that it had something to do with a little oil pipe and that the propeller shaft communicated with the machine guns by sending pulses along the pipe, but more than that I cannot tell you.”

More than that one does not need, and it is a satisfying explanation, unlike the usual muttering about “interrupter gears.” Dahl, never a technologist, managed to give as brief and useful a description of gun/prop synchronization as one can imagine.

The Gladiator’s career was too short to allow for many variants to be developed, so there were only three near-identical versions of the airplane. The original Mk.I had an 840-hp Bristol Mercury driving a fat two-blade, fixed-pitch wooden prop, and the Mk.II received a more efficient three-blade metal prop, plus the Browning guns. The Royal Navy found itself without a fleet-defense fighter, so it got the Sea Gladiator. It had a strengthened tailcone and A-frame arrestor hook, and a pod holding an inflatable raft on its belly between the mainwheel struts, activated by a cable in the cockpit. The dinghy pod was well-located, since a ditched Gladiator would turn turtle the instant its landing gear hit the water, but it was asking a lot of a drowning and upside-down pilot to free himself from a flooded cockpit while remembering to find and pull the raft cable.

Gladiators had some tricky handling qualities, exacerbated by pilots unfamiliar with its relatively high wing loading and flapped landings. During the airplane’s introduction to squadron service, the accident rate was appalling. A brisk stall often led to a spin, which would go flat and become unrecoverable in unskilled hands. During combat maneuvering, Gladiators sometimes spun out of the fight (which might have been a good thing, considering some of its monoplane opponents). Intentional spinning at night was forbidden, and it probably should have been during daylight as well.

Still, the Gladiator was wonderfully aerobatic and became a popular air-display act during its brief late-1930s career when a trio of Gladiators flew formation maneuvers while “chained together” at the wingtips, in the words of one commentator. The chains were actually far more frangible tethers with breakaway fittings.

Dahl had his own concerns about flying the Gladiator, and he wondered, “Who will teach me to fly it? ‘Don’t be an ass [said his squadron commander]. How can anyone teach you when there’s only one cockpit? Just get in and do a few circuits and bumps and you’ll soon get the hang of it. You had better get all the practice you can because the next thing you know you’ll be dicing in the air with some clever little Italian who will be trying to shoot you down.’”

The Gladiator’s wartime career was necessarily brief and, despite some mythmaking, largely ineffectual. Not surprising, since there were few less-capable fighters in action, and all of Germany’s and Italy’s bombers easily outpaced it. The RAF usually sent Gladiators to war zones normally out of reach of Luftwaffe Me-109s. Only one Gladiator squadron participated in the Battle of Britain, and it was stationed in the southwest of England to protect the ports of Plymouth and Falmouth, which were beyond the range of German fighters. Its only contribution to that conflict was the interception of a force of Dornier Do-17 bombers and Messerschmitt Me-110 escorts at the end of September 1940. The Germans were too fast for the Gladiators, and two of the Dorniers bombed Plymouth unchecked. Though Gladiators notched victories against Italian Macchi C.200 and French Dewoitine D.520 monoplanes, there is no record of a Gladiator shooting down an Me-109.

The first Gladiator victory had already been scored by an American, Captain John “Buffalo” Wong, one of the 15 volunteers who flew for the Chinese against the Japanese more than two years before Claire Chennault formed the short-lived American Volunteer Group. In February 1938, Wong shot down an A5M Claude, the fixed-gear, open-cockpit predecessor of the Zero. (Some records credit him with two Claudes.)

Wong’s Chinese American squadronmate Arthur Chin became an ace, with eight victories before the U.S. even entered the war, and 6.5 of them were with the Gladiator. Chin receives credit as the first U.S. ace of World War II. One of his Gladiator victories involved ramming a Claude and then bailing out from his wrecked airplane. The apocryphal story is that he stripped a machine gun from the wreckage of his Gladiator and showed it to Chennault, then an aviation advisor to the Chinese, and asked if he could please have another Gladiator to go with it.

The ultimate Gladiator pilot was Flt. Lt. Marmaduke Thomas St. John “Pat” Pattle, a South African who scored at least 15 victories with Gladiators, first in Egypt and later in Greece. (The rest of his 50-plus shoot-downs were accomplished with Hurricanes.) “Usually outrun, often outgunned but seldom outmaneuvered,” reads one tribute to Pattle, arguably the most skilled and dogged of all Gladiator pilots.

Gladiators fought in the hands of a wide variety of export customers as well as the RAF, and they reached many war zones, including North Africa, Greece, the Middle East, France and Scandinavia. The Norway campaign was one of the Gladiator’s bloodiest battles, and for the RAF, it was a disaster. 

A squadron of Gladiators flew to Norway from the carrier HMS Glorious to help blunt the German invasion in late April 1940, and they surprised the Germans by landing on a frozen lake in the country’s center. (The lake had been selected by Sqdn. Ldr. Whitney Straight, an American racecar driver who in the years before the war had won more international Grand Prix than any other American.) The Gladiators arrived without support personnel, and the pilots found themselves rearming and refueling their airplanes themselves with bitterly cold hands, often using milk cans supplied by local farmers for the fuel. The Luftwaffe reacted quickly with bombing raids, and the lake, already thawing in the spring weather, became increasingly cratered and unstable. After 48 hours of this, the Gladiators were finished as a fighting force, burnt out on the ground and sunk into the boggy water. The squadron hadn’t shot down a single Luftwaffe aircraft. The Air Ministry admitted that the Gladiators had been sent to Norway “as a token sacrifice.”

The squadron received another 18 Gladiators and returned to Norway, this time to an established airfield. They scored several victories over Heinkel 111s and possibly even a Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. Ultimately, what remained of the squadron flew back to the Glorious, despite the Gladiators having no arresting hooks nor any pilots who had made deck landings. Soon after the carrier sailed, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank it and all but two of the Gladiator pilots aboard. It was the end of the Gladiator’s Norwegian adventure.

Nobody can write an account of the Gladiator’s career without extolling the feats of the most famous of all Gladiators, the six airplanes that went by the names of Faith, Hope and Charity. Starting in June 1940 they defended the Mediterranean island of Malta against the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, and unfortunately, their story has become a mix of legend and reality. There were no individual Gladiators named Faith, Hope or Charity, and the honorific was applied to the entire flight of fighters by a Maltese newspaper well after the island had been saved from defeat, largely by Hurricanes and Spitfires. (The remains of a Gladiator on display at Malta’s National War Museum purports to be from Faith.) 

Yet the Malta Gladiators were immensely reassuring to the Maltese as the biplanes stood watch from dawn to dusk and frequently barreled off to intercept incoming Savoia-Marchettis and Capronis. The only way they could attack the bombers was to climb above them and pick up speed in a dive, so they snarled their way upward, full throttle and superchargers set to max (officially forbidden). Their high-angle, low-forward-speed climbs overheated and destroyed their engines, but to the Maltese, they were brave pit bulls lunging to the ends of their chains.

It’s often forgotten that, not counting trainers, there were at least two dozen types of biplanes used on the front lines during World War II. Everyone remembers the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber—the Stringbag—but other biplane fighters included Polikarpov I-15s, Avia B-534s, Hawker Furies and particularly Fiat CR.42 Falco biplanes, the Gladiator’s most evenly matched rival.

The Falco was in fact a sesquiplane, not a biplane; it had lower wings of less than half the area of the upper wing. It also had an open cockpit and fixed landing gear, yet it was about 15 mph faster than the Gladiator. The Gloster was more maneuverable than the Italian fighter, particularly in a turning fight. The Gladiator’s biggest advantage was that it carried a radio with about five miles of air-to-air range, allowing coordinated attacks while the Italian pilots could only gesture and nod their heads. Gladiators had a 1.2-to-1 victory ratio over CR.42s—much the same as the Me-109’s advantage over the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain: close enough to call it even. 

After the war, Gladiators were essentially worthless. British collector Vivian Bellamy bought two hulks for a pound sterling apiece in 1951 and created a single flyable airplane, which he sold to the Gloster company for £50. That airplane was later restored and today is part of the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, England. It is one of only two flying Gladiators remaining. In September 2021, the Malta Aviation Museum announced plans to create a flyable replica built around one small part salvaged from what they claim was the sunken Gladiator Charity, but that project seems to be in limbo.

The Gloster Gladiator: honor this cranky and archaic yet iconic and innovative fighter, but offer a prayer for all the pilots who had to go into combat with it. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Soldiers suspended in the air in moon boots and sniping unsuspecting targets on the ground might sound like a battle tactic from a future war, but such a concept for an Army hovercraft actually traces its roots to the 1950s.

That’s when a rotor-propelled standing platform was picked up by Office of Naval Research, which based its design on National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics engineer Charles Zimmerman’s invention known as the “Flying Shoes.”

The result was a “one-man, twin-engine, flying platform with two counter-rotating rotors turning on vertical axis inside ducted fan,” according to the National Air and Space Museum.

In essence, the platform resembled a flying disk with a guardrail to prevent those riding from falling out.

One piece of promotional material provided to Military Times by the U.S. Army Transportation Museum reads, “It Flies! The Navy Comes Up with A Real ‘Flying Saucer.’”

In 1956, ONR came up with a series of prototype models. Ultimately its 1031-A-1 flew, but the Army wanted a larger version with more thrust. The craft eventually evolved into the Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee before the project was scrapped.

“The extra engines required for redundancy if the primary failed made the platform so heavy that it was impossible for the pilot to control the craft kinesthetically (by leaning), defeating the purpose of the design,” according to the Smithsonian.

As a result, the Army’s interest in the platform waned, and the Hiller hovercraft’s dreams came crashing down.

“Seven Hiller Flying Platforms in all are believed to have been built,” according to “Vertical Challenge: The Hiller Aircraft Story” by Jay Spenser. “Retired after several years of use, the historic first example … is now on view at the Hiller Aircraft Museum in Redwood City, California.”

And while the technology was shelved, a battlefield full of flying soldiers isn’t out of the realm of possibility. DARPA is working to bring military-ready jetpacks to modern combat with its Portable Personal Air Mobility System.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

As France began to recover from World War II, its once-formidable aviation industry was revived just as the jet age was forcing a major reappraisal of aircraft design. Jet experiments began producing a fascinating variety of aircraft, ranging from the sublime to the absurd to the just plain weird. One such product of those pioneer years, the Sud-Est Aviation Grognard, looks almost grotesque in retrospect, but there was logic behind it.

When the Armée de l’Air issued a specification for a jet ground-attack plane in 1948, Sud-Est’s engineers were ready with a concept they’d been working on since 1945. First flying on April 30, 1950, after a somewhat protracted development, the Sud-Est SE.2410 was intended to have two SOCEMA TGAR 1008 turbojet engines, but for the time being it used a pair of Hispano-built Rolls-Royce Nene 101 turbojets producing 4,940 lb. of thrust each, for a projected maximum speed of 645 mph, a 530-mile range and a ceiling of 38,050 feet. To maintain symmetry and controllability if one powerplant failed, the engines were stacked one atop the other midway down the fuselage, with the upper staggered slightly ahead of the lower. There was one large dorsal intake up front and two exhausts in the rear. (This arrangement proved to be a rarity among jets but was used with success on the English Electric Lightning interceptor.) The pilot sat up front, an ideal position for ground attack, but with a framed canopy rather than one of the bubble canopies that were already demonstrating their superior visibility and reduced drag. A final odd touch was the tailplane, which was mounted low on the aft fuselage, looking like an afterthought but kept well clear of the exhausts.

The SE.2410 was 51 feet 6 inches long and 17 feet tall. The wings, set at a 47-degree angle, were 45 feet 6 inches in span with a wing area of 495 square feet. Its armament was to have included two 30mm DEFA cannons, which were never installed, as well as four 550-lb or two 750-lb. bombs or up to 12 rockets. It could also mount up to four Matra T-10 air-to-air missiles under the wings, which did gain the Grognard a niche in aviation history as being the first French airplane to fire air-to-air guided missiles.

Given its role in support of ground troops, Sud-Est’s design team nicknamed it the Grognard (“grumbler,” an affectionate term for Emperor Napoleon I’s elite “Old Guard”). A lot of its test pilots and ground crewmen, however, were inspired by its compact but less-than-graceful layout to call it le Bossu (“hunchback”).

Sud-Est planned to advance the Grognard with three more prototypes but ended up producing only one more. Making its maiden flight on February 14, 1951, the SE.2415 Grognard II was 2-seater with radar and an operator, whose altered center of gravity was countered by reducing the wing sweep to 32 degrees. Given the altitudes at which the crew were expected to operate, the cockpit was not pressurized.

While the first prototype had flown well from the start, the Grognard II experienced tail flutter and was damaged in a belly landing. It was the rapidly accelerating state of the art, however, that ultimately brought the project to an end. In 1952 the Armée de l’Air altered its requirements for something more versatile and Sud-Ouest Aviation produced the goods with a newer, more promising design that entered service in 1954 as the SO.4050 Vautour (“vulture”). The Grognard continued to fly as a test bed and Grognard II soldiered on the ground as a target until 1954, when both aircraft were scrapped.

Some of us literally built our passion for aviation at kitchen tables and basement workbenches as we carefully followed directions to create airplane replicas we could hang in aerial battle from the bedroom ceiling.

For me, it was the artwork on the model box—that painting of a favorite airplane—that could make an eight-year-old give up lawn-mowing money faster than you could ask, “Do you need glue with that?” 

For the most part, the artists who created that compelling art went unsung. Commercial art is an immediate business where the all-important deadline rules, and the names of many of the artists who produced captivating box art in the 1950s and ’60s have been lost. But just because commercial artists rarely see their work on gallery walls, that doesn’t mean they are any less talented than an artist being lauded at an opening in Soho. The illustrators of those model boxes did their job by captivating modelmakers with their art. Lured by the box illustrations, kids like me bought and built the kits, read the books about the airplanes we had constructed and, in some cases, found aviation turning into a lifelong obsession.

Artists like Jack Leynnwood, Jo Kotula, Roy Grinnell, John Steel and Roy Cross were only a few of the talented illustrators who produced the paintings on the outside of cardboard boxes full of plastic possibility. Collectors today seek out their original art, which can command prices well beyond what the original artist received for the work. 

Here we offer an all-too-brief collection of some art from these overlooked masters. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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It could have been a game-changer. The twin-engine, single-seat Westland Whirlwind, produced by a small company in southwest England, looked like a formidably potent weapon. The four 20mm cannon packed close together in the nose could take out a tank when nothing else flying could. It was also innovative. It had a bubble canopy, intakes in the wing’s leading edges, slats and Fowler flaps. It had a slab-sided fuselage over the wing, which was the ultimate solution to high-speed interference drag. When it first flew on October 11, 1938, the Whirlwind was arguably the fastest, most heavily armed fighter in the world.

Today, very few have heard of it. Westland built only 114 and the Royal Air Force sent the Whirlwind to Scotland to keep it out of the fighting during the Battle of Britain. It has often been labeled a failure. The reason given has always been the inability of its two 885-hp Rolls-Royce Peregrine engines to deliver speed at altitude.

The RAF’s testing program had given the aircraft a clean bill of health and a ceiling of 31,000 feet. However, as the first trickle of aircraft began to arrive with No. 25 and 263 Squadrons in 1940, service pilots began to question why the altitude performance wasn’t what it was during test flights. “It must be emphasised…that the performance of the Whirlwind above 20,000 feet falls off rapidly, and it is considered that above 25,000 feet its fighting qualities are very poor,” read one report. “The maximum height so far attained is 27,000 feet but on every occasion that a height test has been carried out there has been a minor defect, either in airscrew revolutions or in lack of boost pressure.”

The reply from the technical director of the test facility was straightforward—the aircraft in service were identical in all respects to the one tested, so the difference couldn’t be explained. The Whirlwind’s own designer, the eccentric W.E.W. “Teddy” Petter, blamed a fall-off in boost pressures delivered by the superchargers with height at “twice the rate anticipated.” By doing so, he placed the blame with the Rolls-Royce engines division.

The key difference between the tested prototype and the Whirlwinds in service was considered too minor to be worth commenting on officially at the time. It was the propeller. The prototype sent by Westland to the RAF had a one-off Rotol propeller design, not the de Havilland/Hamilton propellers that the production Whirlwinds received. 

The metal blades of the de Havilland props were very thick for a high-performance fighter—they had a 9.6% thickness-to-chord ratio (at the standard measuring point 70% of the way out along the blade). For comparison, the Spitfire’s blades were similar, but at 7.6% the ratio was smaller. This wouldn’t matter at low speed, but in a climb at 15,000 feet the tip of the Whirlwind’s propeller moved at Mach 0.72. Here, the difference between the 6% ratio at the tip of the Spitfire’s prop and the 8% of the Whirlwind’s was literally critical, meaning the tips approached the speed of sound. But an even bigger problem came with the combination of a thick profile blade with a constant speed mechanism.

That mechanism was—and remains—a widely used solution for keeping an engine turning at the optimum speed to produce maximum horsepower, whether the aircraft is moving slowly or at its maximum speed. This is done by changing the “bite”—the angle of attack of the propeller blades. Increasing the blades’ angle of attack increases the drag and thus the braking effect on the engine. To maintain a constant RPM at varying speeds, the pilot controls the propeller’s pitch. A constant speed unit automates the process, with the pilot setting the desired RPM. The unit senses if shaft speed drops, and “fines” the blades appropriately by changing pitch. The Whirlwind had two de Havilland constant speed units under its sleek cowls.

Dynamic tests in 1938 showed that the massive onset of drag above critical Mach would cause the blades to pivot—reduce pitch—as the constant speed mechanism hunted for a lower-drag condition to maintain RPM. Mach number lowers with altitude, so as the Whirlwind climbed at a constant RPM, relative Mach over the blades increased. Moving steadily inwards, more of the blade “went critical” as the phenomenon of compressibility created shock waves, drag rose exponentially and the blade turned farther to compensate.

This could reduce the blade angle of attack beyond zero. Add in any amount of aircraft pitch (and in a climb at altitude the aircraft would be pitched several degrees higher than line-of-flight) and shock waves would run up and down the blades as they spun. Wildly varying dynamic pressures would pass into the ram-air intakes, which sit immediately behind the blades. The intermittently windmilling prop would produce fluctuating boost pressures on top of reduced RPM.

It was very shortly after receiving the report about “very poor” fighting qualities above 25,000 feet that Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, made his decision to keep the Whirlwind away from any fighting in the south, sealing its reputation as the fighter that missed the Battle of Britain. “The limiting factor in the present fighting against ME 109s in the South of England is the performance, manoeuvrability and climb at high altitudes, and a difference in service ceiling of 2,000 feet is a very important advantage,” Dowding said. “It therefore seems to me quite wrong to introduce at the present time a fighter whose effective ceiling is 25,000 feet.”

Ultimately the cancellation of the Whirlwind in November 1940 was an economic decision. Rolls needed to concentrate on developing and producing Merlin and Griffon engines, and it was never too sensible (“extravagant,” as Dowding called it) to produce a fighter that required two engines to do what another might with one. 

Contrary to popular belief, the Whirlwind went on to serve successfully for another three years, unaltered, in the role of a low-level strike aircraft over the English Channel and occupied France. More than one veteran has commented that they felt comfortable taking on Fw-190s in 1943 in the unmodified, undeveloped 1938 Whirlwind. Down low nothing could catch a Whirlwind. It was maneuverable, practically viceless and its pilots learned to love it.

There is little doubt that the thick blades with the wrong airfoil section held the Whirlwind back. By the time fighters were doing 420 mph and higher at altitude with two-stage superchargers and blade tip speeds of over Mach 1, the blades were very thin and had profiles that had been developed to negate compressibility completely. But by then the time had passed for the Whirlwind and the much-maligned Peregrines that powered it. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Aviation comes with some inherent risks and that can lead to tragedy. Such was the case at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2023 AirVenture, the annual show that takes place at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Over the course of the week-long event on July 24-30, four people lost their lives. Two died when their North American T-6 Texan, a World War II-era training aircraft, crashed into a nearby lake. They were identified as Devyn Reiley, 30, and Zach Colliemoreno, 20. Two other attendees perished in a crash between a RotorWay 162F helicopter and an ELA 10 Eclipse gyrocopter. Thomas Volz, 72, and Mark Peterson, 68, died in the crash and two others were injured. Both accidents took place on July 29.

I attended the show but had departed by the day of the accidents. As I did last year, I flew out from central Pennsylvania as a passenger in a 1962 Piper Comanche owned and flown by Tom LeCompte, a friend, pilot, aviation enthusiast, and writer (Tom’s account of the airplane accident that killed singer Patsy Cline appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Aviation History.)

We did things a little differently this year by making an overnight stop in Dayton, Ohio, to visit the National Museum of the U.S Air Force. Talk about a lot of airplanes! The museum is huge and contains multitudes. I was most impressed by the B-36 Peacemaker and the XB-70 Valkyrie, both gigantic airplanes that pushed the bounds of aviation technology in their time. I also took so many photos and videos in the World War II gallery that I nearly drained the battery on my phone. I ended up having to borrow Tom’s so I could take more photos. Even after spending five hours at the museum, we didn’t see everything. I guess I will have to go back.

The next stop was in Madison, Wisconsin, where Tom had plans to link up with a group of Mooney pilots to take part in a mass fly-in to Oshkosh. There were 54 planes—51 of them Mooneys, two of them Pipers, and one RV. So, we were definitely one of the odd planes out, but the Mooneys welcomed us aboard anyway.

There was a briefing session the night before the flight. As a right-seater, my job was essentially to keep quiet and not distract the pilot, a task I was reasonably certain I could handle. Then the pilots went over everything they needed to know, including the schedule, takeoff and landing procedures, radio frequencies and so forth. The planes would all take off and fly in elements of three—Tom and I were the #3 airplane in the Romeo element—and there was also a lead and a tail pilot. After the briefing, all the pilots went out the parking lot to do the “dirt dance,” in which they all walked through the flight so they knew exactly what to do.

It was quite a sight the next morning to watch all those airplanes taxi out and line up on the runway in Madison, and something else altogether as the elements took off one by one and soared above the Wisconsin state capitol and on to Oshkosh. The fight was only about 35 minutes or so and I kept myself busy taking photos and videos. Sometimes prop wash created a little turbulence, which increased my already high levels of adrenaline. Tom kept focused on Romeo 1 in front of us; Romeo 2 in our rear was similarly focused on our Piper. The two Romeos seemed so close I felt like I could throw a rock and hit them (which, naturally, I did not attempt). It gave me a new respect for the World War II pilots who did this kind of thing on a regular basis—while other pilots were trying to kill them. Fortunately, we encountered no hostiles on our flight, and we all landed safely, with our wheels hitting the runway at the same moment as Romeo 1’s did, exactly as we were supposed to.

And then we were at Oshkosh. There are two things you can expect if you attend the AirVenture. First, you’ll see lots of airplanes. Second, you’re likely to experience some thunderstorms. The first thunderstorm hit that evening but left us unscathed, although the wind had my tent performing some interesting gyrations.

II spent the next few days watching the historic aircraft that had gathered for the event. There was a lot to see! I’d look up and see the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Doc or the B-17 Flying Fortress Aluminum Overcast fly over. I watched a long-winged Lockheed U-2 do a flyby low over the runway at Wittman field. In the afternoons aerobatic airplanes twisted, twirled and spewed smoke during the airshows. The sounds of jets and propellers filled the air at all times. The really big airplanes—including a Super Guppy and a C-117—occupied the expanse of Boeing Plaza. Nearby was the newly restored P-51C Thunderbird, which had once been owned by actor James Stewart and record-setting pilot Jackie Cochran. Vintage aircraft had their own section, as did warbirds from World War II and other conflicts. An aviation village sprang up in the fields around the airport as thousands of private airplane owners set up camp next to their craft.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There were also talks and demonstrations and hundreds of vendors offering anything connected with aviation, from airplane tech to baby clothes. The EAA Aviation Museum is nearby, too, and I spent some time there looking at their collections. Later in the day we could sit in front of our tents and watch as everything from an F-22 to a flight of Texans soared by. There’s really nothing like it. The EAA estimates the show had a record attendance of 677,000 people. More than 10,000 airplanes flew into Wittman and surrounding airports. There were 3,365 showplanes at the event, which the EAA broke down as 1,497 vintage aircraft, 1,067 homebuilts, 380 warbirds, 194 ultralights, 134 seaplanes and amphibians, 52 aerobatic airplanes and 41 rotorcraft. Some 40,000 people camped out in the facility’s 13,000 campsite. Those are all big numbers.

Tom and I set out for home on Wednesday morning, but not until we had to wait out another thunderstorm that turned the sky an ominous gray and pelted Oshkosh with driving rain. We were packed and ready to go but had to wait out the storm in the Mooney group’s big tent. Stray lightning bolts were still snapping to the ground off in the distance as we lifted off from Wittman and made our way around the perimeter of the storm before crossing Lake Michigan and continuing the journey east. The show we left behind was still untainted by the tragedies to come on Saturday.

Here are a few more photos from the show.