Military Posts

I enjoyed Pam Leblanc’s story when I read it in another magazine. I asked, and she graciously allowed us to reprint it here. Enjoy – RM______________________________By Pam LeBlancThey had to cinch up the waistbands of their oversized,…

“Who controls the past, controls the future.Who controls the present controls the past.”George Orwell, from his novel, 1984The name Enola Gay may mean nothing to quite a few people these days. That’s OK. While I never met Enola Gay, I’ll betcha …

When it was revealed in a BBC interview, The Fighter Pilots Hunting Houthi Drones Over the Red Sea, that Marine Captain Earl Ehrhart, an AV-8B Harrier pilot aboard the USS Bataan, had downed seven drones, subsequent stories on this action hailed him…

By Rob MarkAn early scene in An Officer and a Gentleman, the 1982 movie about U.S. Navy recruits slogging their way through officer candidate school, has granite-tough Marine Gunnery Sgt. Foley (actor Lou Gossett Jr.) confronting candidate Zack May…

The brothers Wright solved the conundrum of three-axis control for powered aircraft with the pitch, yaw, and roll control through the combined forces of an elevator, rudder, and wing warping. Glenn Curtiss effectively won his roll control legal batt…

To maintain my social skills, on Fridays I hike the Wiouwash Trail for 2.46 miles from the trailhead just east of Winneconne to the Bare Bones Brewery, which is trailside where the former interurban railbed enters Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on its northwes…

Guided by triangles and French curves, pencil applied to paper is how ideas made the transition to all things aviation. Mechanical drawing was its moniker and the artists who precisely lined each part of some aeronautical creation so hands-on crafts…

Given the capable reliability of aviation technology today, in the realm of a perfect world, single-pilots flying people-carrying commercial and military aircraft seems a logical hypothetical possibility.To prove the reality of this possibility, th…

The recent political and military focus on aerostats—balloons—and the resulting cyclone of incomplete communication of verifiable concrete details, the confusion resulting from people demonstrating that they possess no knowledge or understanding of …

Combine the historically low unemployment rate with decades of conflicts that citizens cannot remember, enumerate, explain, or even acknowledge knowing about them in the first place, and it should be no surprise that volunteers are ignoring the US a…

President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948. It mandated the desegregation of the US military. Truman stood firm in the face of pushback from politicians and military officers of all ranks from all branches who opposed an int…

Much has been made of the actors portraying naval aviators in Top Gun: Maverick being filmed in the aft seat of an F-18 Super Hornet to capture the sagging distortion of real-life g-forces. Compare that to the challenges faced by Charles “Budd…

During World War II the US military carved thousands of airfields into the American landscape. Of the hundreds that still serve our aerial infrastructure, few maintain a general connection to their original mission. An exception might be Utah’…

During a bimonthly recon of a used bookstore hoping that some unexpected title would catch my eye, Indestructible: One Man’s Mission That Changed the Course of World War II arrested my scan with the image of a red Beech 18 wearing prewar US re…

The bait dangled by AARP Studios was the 10-minute Reporting for Duty documentary about Lt. Carey Lohrenz, who in 1994 became one of the first female aviators to fly the F-14 Tomcat. The latest of eight episodes so far produced, the YouTube channel …

As one crawling into the final third of life, I’m in no hurry to write my final chapters. That said, May 27—when Top Gun: Maverick is due in our local movie house—cannot get here soon enough. To accelerate the passage of time, I’ve been …

Few veterans that fought in World War II are still with us today, and that’s as true for aircraft as well as the pilots who flew them. It is especially true for the veterans who were recalled for Korea, America’s forgotten war, which con…

Researching the 75th anniversary of Project Thunderstorm, conducted at the U.S. Air Force’s All-Weather Flying Center in Wilmington, Ohio, from May to September, 1947, I admired the courage of the volunteer pilots, weather observers, and airbo…

Like many history-obsessed aviation geeks, I had a passing knowledge of Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown defined by the most common bullet points that most often summarized his life. He was (he passed in 2016 at age 97) a Royal Navy aviator a…

Admiring historic airplanes from a museum floor is a big-picture perspective of their contributions, whatever they may be, to aviation. Regardless the aeronautical era or the scope of the story, the viewer’s mind readily puts the winged artifa…

Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Experience CEO Troy Thrash said the Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless on display in the World War II exhibit was the team’s first Lake Michigan restoration project. The eight-year effort took place years ago in a building…

When it comes to aircraft, restoration and reincarnation may seem like synonyms, but there is a significant difference that transcends semantics.Restoration is rehabilitating an airplane to a former point in its existence. Certainly, this is what t…

What makes the aerospace menagerie on display at Kalamazoo’s Air Zoo special is its unique airplanes, as in the only one in the world, the sole survivor of a specific make and model. With its black skin fading into the main display floor’…

A pandemic addiction to YouTube has delivered consistently interesting, entertaining, and educational interludes when its selection algorithm introduced me to Ward Carroll, a retired naval flight officer who spent most of his career as a radar inter…