Recent content by OldGeezer

I'll put this out here, from "Luftwaffe Fighter Ace," the autobiographical memoir by Norbert Hanning. Describing one engagement: "Our twelve FW-190A-6s had been sent up against a force of some 250 American B-17 bombers escorted by dozens of P-51 Mustang fighters. And the result? One fighter...

The Ural Bomber initiative was the German name for a project that's been well documented. It's worth reading up on if you have an interest. Actually, for once the Wikipedia article is pretty good.

Maybe it's been covered already, but apart from any oath that he may have taken, there's still the overarching issue of ITAR, the International Trade in Arms Regulation, that prohibits exports of technical products (hardware, software, expertise, information) without a license from the State...

Anyone interested in questions like this should read Cajus Bekker's "Luftwaffe War Diaries" where Appendix 11 is the 1954 statement "by Field-Marshal Kesselring on the Subject of Luftwaffe Policy and the Question of a German Four-engined Bomber." Copies of that book seem to be not very...

One thing that's often overlooked is that the top of the canopy, where the curve reverses from up to down, is often a contributor to critical Mach number, even on propeller planes. In the process of going up and over and back down, the local airflow undergoes quite a bit of acceleration and...

It would have to be. Of course in the WW2 era they wouldn't have worried so much about that, since planes weren't expected to last for decades like ours are today.

The old reliable "Standard Aircraft Handbook" shows exploding rivets as one type of fastener, but I never knew anybody actually used them. Good info!

Last July I posted a photo of a radial engine sitting at a local classic auto repair shop and asked if anyone knew what it was. Got a few responses but nobody was sure. I went back and found the tag, it turned out to be a Polish engine. You find the strangest things in the strangest places!

Just saw another document showing that PC-625 also shot down an unidentified single-engine fighter. Not with its antiaircraft armament - with 3 shots from its 3-inch main gun, "the second appearing to burst dead on the plane" which "immediately dived vertically into the water and disappeared."...

I'll preface this by saying that I never knew my father. My parents divorced when I was very young and all I ever heard about him was negative stuff. I don't doubt that a lot of it was true but still, it would have been nice to have a more balanced picture. Anyway I found out recently that he'd...

Yep, that was the show my sister-in-law was addicted to!

True story: I spent decades working in the field of aircraft survivability, mostly doing things called "failure modes, effects, and criticalities analyses" (FMECAs) for all kinds of military airplanes. The last one I did before retiring was for Boeing's KC-46 tanker, based on the 767 airframe...

How about one from my boyhood, over half a century ago, when modeling was much more basic than it is now. I tried a 1/72 diorama using twigs from the yard as trees, and a mixture of salt and flour (I think) with water to make the sparkly snow. It looked fine (except for that one tree!) until...

Boeing's current sad mess is 100% of its own making. I spent decades working for them before retiring, and the environment was just completely toxic. Seattle hated St Louis, even though it was the Defense side that kept the Commercial side afloat for several years of catastrophically...

Wow, I haven't thought about ARBS in decades! I spent the 1980s working AV-8B and potential (but never built) derivatives at McDonnell Douglas, and I remember having mixed feelings when they replaced ARBS with radar. I vividly remember the briefing we got on one live fire exercise which had to...