Recent content by Cub Driver

Erich Hartmann 825 missions, 352 kills, shot down 14 times. Was there ever a better argument for strafing a parachutist in his shrouds? If the first guy who shot Hartmann's plane down had stuck around to kill the pilot, he would have potentially spared the lives or freedom of several hundred...

Early in the war (that is to say, September 1937), the Chinese had Italian planes and advisor/trainers. They didn't survive long, and the Curtiss Hawk II and III became the CAF standby both as fighter and as bomber until Russian planes and pilots came in. Given that in the winter of 1941-1942...

Note also that it is always the Other who is strafing parachutings, and the more Other he is, the more likely we are to believe that he plinked men in their shrouds (what a name!). Thus the Japanese are the worst, and close to them the Russians. Germans are more likely perps than Allied pilots...

It's difficult to envision a level headed flyer from any nation perpetrating such a cowardly act Actually a very rational act. If you kill the pilot today--parachuting over his own ground--he won't be up there tomorrow to kill you. If the RAF were less likely to strafe parachuting German...

There's a million dollars or more in the typical restoration. No way is someone with a million dollars to spend going to accept a dinged and dirty aircraft in return! I once wrote an article about the AD Skyraider as nuclear bomber. Every pilot I interviewed remarked on the filth of the...

The USA had the huge benefit of being able to learn from the European battles before December 1941 and they were by no means common in the USA at that time. Here's the experience of Curtiss-Wright: the plain vanilla P-40 (what ought to have been called P-40A) was without self-sealing tanks...

The aerial battles over Rangoon at Christmas 1941 are particularly well covered in Japanese histories, even unto diagrams showing how formations lost bombers, mile by mile and minute by minute. So I did a quick calculation on Japanese overclaiming, and it came to 5 to 1, as opposed to the...

Because of the high-ranging "German 88" flak gun, bombers over Germany had to fly at higher altitudes than anywhere else in the world, at least until B-29s began operating over the home islands of Japan. Japanese planes especially tended to fly at at medium altitudes--14,000 feet in the case...

Well, the JNAF pretty much adapted that particular nomenclature from the USN's. What's always baffled me about the JNAF and JAAF formal nomenclature is that it was (and is) almost never used. A Japanese writer almost never says "A6M" or "Ki-43" but instead Type Zero or Type One, sometimes but...

The problem of course is that nobody ever writes about familiar things! However, there are ten pages of emails from on the Spadguys speak, dating from an article I wrote about tossing nukes from a Spad. Maybe you could Google some of these guys. (I didn't put the emails in the messages as...

There was indeed a runway which could have handled a B-29 of any weight! This appeared in a British pilots' chat board, Wittering 5 mile runway -- is it true? - PPRuNe Forums Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

London to Moscow is 1359 nautical miles. Guam to Tokyo is 1354 nautical miles -- and the 29s often went much further than Tokyo. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It wasn't hypothetical. During the Berlin crisis of the late 1940s, Truman sent B-29s to England to impress the Russians with the risks they were running by blockading Berlin. As it happens, they weren't Silverplate models, and the U.S. probably had no deployable atomic bombs at the time, but...

Given that Germany didn't control many Atlantic islands, it developed a rather stunning system whereby a refueling freighter was stationed en route. It would tow a large fiber mat which served the double purpose of calming the waves and providing a "tarmac" for the seaplane, which landed on the...

5116 nautical miles (and that's the Great Circle route without any allowance for wind drift etc). Tha's 5887 statute or land miles Would take 25:35 at a ground speed of 200 knots. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford