Picture of the day (general).... (6 Viewers)

[Lucky13]

Fully loaded Douglas A-1 Skyraider attack aircraft on the deck of USS Bon Homme Richard. Vietnam, 1965.

 

[MiTasol]

Notably as these were used hand me down from the USAAF...

used hand me down being a very polite way of saying rejected by

 

[GreenKnight121]

Soviet delegation, Brest Litovsk (01-15-1918) :

Seated left to right :
Lev Kamenev (executed august 25,1936)
Adolph Joffé (suicide november 16, 1927)
Anastasia Bitsenko (executed june 16, 1938).

Standing left to right :
Vladimir Lipskiy (?)
Peteris Stucka (natural death 1932)
Léon Trotski (murdered august 2, 1940)
Lev Karakhan (executed september 20, 1937).

Not present :
Nikolaï Krylenko (executed july 29, 1938).
Grigori Sokolnikov (murdered by NKVD may 21, 1938).

View attachment 789339

Stalin made a policy to "remove" anyone who developed a fame or standing that attracted supporters, as he wanted no one to be able to pressure or replace himself.

 

[GreenKnight121]

The most beautiful jet fighter ever made....change my mind!

View attachment 827731

View attachment 827732

View attachment 827733

View attachment 827734

View attachment 827735

Why should I try... when I agree with you!

 

[Lucky13]

The sun rises over the airfield at Menidi/Tatoi, Greece, as groundcrew remove the covers from Bristol Blenheim Mark I,
L8374 'X', of No. 84 Squadron RAF, for a morning raid over Albania. L8374 was one of two Blenheims shot down when
nine aircraft of the Squadron bombed the Kucera oil fields on the 22nd of December 1940.

Wikipedia

 

[Wurger]

Source, Jan .. source.

 

[Lucky13]

Not what I expected when I asked for a window seat!

Source: Interweb

 

[fannum]

used hand me down being a very polite way of saying rejected by

I'll call big time BS on that! The Air Force NEVER has supported the close ground support role, leaving that to the Army and Navy post 1947, trying to support troops in Korea with puny and inadequate F-80s and F-84s.
Come the 'brush wars' in Indochina, the USAF was unequipped to respond, while the Navy had refined the AD/A-1 to replace a bunch of their WWII more specialized fighters/light bombers/torpedo aircraft. I was assigned to VT-30 in Corpus, the ATU/RAG for the fleet, and by '63, half of our students were Vietnamese who had been trained to fly by the Air Force, but attempts to modernize P-51s, B-26s and T-28s had proven inadequate, so the Navy came to the rescue.
Eventually, we did a rush job training a bunch of Air Force instructors on the A-1H/Js, and they took over the whole program, refurbishing a bunch of USN ASW/EW multi-seat versions from the boneyard, which became A-1Es.
I was sent to 'Nam in '63 to support the RVNAF ADs which were slow to arrive, and wound up maintaining and flying a veritable hodge podge of aircraft, logging most of my time as crew chief/door gunner in H-34 recip helos (a fiction at the time was "Limited Wars" with turbines verboten!)
Soon the Navy phased out the A-1s, largely as it was difficult for an aircraft carrier to maintain tanks/fueling systems for both JP and 115/145 Avgas, and the A-4s then A-7s proved decent in the role. Note that the USAF soon picked up the A-7 from the Navy as well ... and remember who was responsible for the F-4!
The ONLY USAF a/c adopted by the Navy is the FJ-2/3 Fury, adapted from the F-86H, but remember the F-86 program grew out of the Navy straight wing FJ-I specs and design work.

 

[fannum]

Stalin made a policy to "remove" anyone who developed a fame or standing that attracted supporters, as he wanted no one to be able to pressure or replace himself.

Especially Zhukov, who won the war for him, then was stripped of all positions, and virtually exiled.
... and who remembers Trotsky or Beria???

 

[fannum]

View attachment 828829
Fully loaded Douglas A-1 Skyraider attack aircraft on the deck of USS Bon Homme Richard. Vietnam, 1965.

I still see two empty racks.

One of the war's Dirty Little Secrets was the Pentagon measured results by sorties, not ordnance expended or results. Problem was that the supply chain couldn't keep up with either bombs or spare parts.

So-o-o, birds would get launched with half loads to keep up the mission count, and if they didn't expend ordnance, some were encouraged to bring it back to the carrier!

Worse yet, there are accounts of birds with down gripes being launched, but then 'aborting' ... one more tick in the ops log!

 

[special ed]

Not what I expected when I asked for a window seat!

View attachment 829391

Source: Interweb

Has anyone noticed the worried look on the man's face?

 

[Lucky13]

Officer's kepi worn by Capt. Pierce of the 13th Massachusetts Volunteers....

 

[Lucky13]

Here I had to sit down, the first word that popped into my head was....dad!
Damn....how eerily similar he is to my dad at one time!

 

[MIflyer]

P-47N's on Escort Carrier Casablanca enroute from SFrisco to Guam

 

[SaparotRob]

It's cool seeing AAF on USN flight decks.

 

[MIflyer]

USS Barnes escort carrier enroute to the Pacific theater.

 

[MiTasol]

 

[MIflyer]

Another TBD from the Lady Lex.

 

[Wurger]

 

[fannum]

P-47N's on Escort Carrier Casablanca enroute from SFrisco to Guam
View attachment 829441

Carrier was going there.
Ship's a/c were all below on hangar deck.
Saved the AAF mech time and effort to assemble. (50 man effort for each, and some guy had to read instructions ... Real Men don' need no steenkin' 'structions!)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slfLBVUEQNw
... or dragging them down narrow streets from docks, some times they just launched them!