Military Posts

For about a month that follows EAA AirVenture, the most popular question posed by friends and acquaintances is What is the most interesting airplane you saw? This has always been the question since I attended my first Oshkosh convocation in 1978, an…

Carrying no expectations, I walked through the main door of Seattle’s Museum of Flight when it opened last Friday and was immediately overwhelmed by the airy, light filled Great Gallery. With aircraft of all types from all eras, it provides a compre…

Working my way home on US 20, about 10 miles outside of Casper, Wyoming, I approached the entrance to the Natrona County International Airport. For a moment I debated making the left turn because nearly all of the airports I’d visited in the precedi…

There is no other way to put it. The Planes of Fame Air Museum overwhelmed me. Drowning in the aviation history it showcases, and the aviation provenance of the airport in Chino, California, where it presents it, I don’t know where to start this pie…

Following the airport signs posted along the historic path of Route 66 added some welcome surprises on the journey from Chicago to Santa Monica, but several airports were predetermined destinations. One of them was Arizona’s Kingman Airport (IGM). B…

The last thing I expected to find on the historic route of US 66 at the edge of the small town of Weatherford, population 10,833 (according to the 2010 census), in western Oklahoma was not only a first-rate air and space museum, but one affiliated w…

On a journey from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California, that followed the historic route of what was US Route 66, I kept my promise to heed the little green signs I passed that pointed toward small town airports. Riding down the curving dr…

Coming face-to-face with a truly rare airplane is one of aviation’s singular rewards. And to actually see it fly, oh, be still my fluttering aviation geek heart. The Martin Mars is coming to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, and for the first time since I don…

Jumping from any elevation, even a knee-high footstool, has never been something I have eagerly anticipated, which makes my lifelong fascination with parachutes hard to explain. It all started in the early 1960s, I think, with my godparents, who fed…

After reading almost every word written about the National Air & Space Museum “s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the last emotion I expected when walking through the door was overwhelming surprise. But taking in the second-floor panorama of the Boeing…

The U.S. Air Force opened the doors on its new, and as yet unnamed, long-range strike bomber, the B-21. The contract pasted in the cockpit window said each bomber would cost $500 million and the total program cost for a fleet of 100 B-21s would be $…

Maybe it’s a pilot thing, but I find the insides of airplanes just as interesting, and often more interesting, than their outsides. Cockpits and crew stations is where humans interface with the machine that carries them aloft, and I’m always curious…

If you care about the aviation industry and the veterans, whose honorable service earned them GI Bill benefits that lead to the degrees leading to careers in it, you need to be aware of HR 3016. You may wonder what the VA Provider Equity Act, which …

On your way someplace else, how many times have you passed a sign pointing to a small town airport? The more important question is how many times have you followed that sign? With the potential for unknown delays between the sign and your intended d…

The men who united as a crew in the vertical war over Europe after Pearl Harbor have all since surrendered, as we all must one day, to time. Its last living member, radio operator Robert Hanson, passed into history in 2005 at age 85. But their spir…

On my inaugural visit to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, I expected nothing more than the opportunity to meet many of the airplanes I’ve read about in their tactile, three-dimensional magnificence. The museum, part of the Nationa…

Trailer for Above and Beyond. Wandering through the recently added titles to Netflix’s “watch now” films the other night, I came across Above and Beyond, a documentary about the birth of what became the Israeli Air Force during the nation’s 1948…

When John Slemp came to the JetWhine.com lunch at EAA AirVenture 2015, he carried with him a large flat package that was maybe 20 by 24 inches by an inch deep and wrapped in brown paper. At such gatherings, most people just show up with their appeti…

Frederick Payne, America’s oldest surviving combat fighter ace, died August 6 at age 104. According to his obituary in The New York Times, the retired U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general earned this singular achievement at the controls of a Grumman …

Most Americans today have but two connections with those who serve and have served in the military, and especially those who have perished in that service. The first is the hollow seconds it takes to utter “Thank you for your service,” an seemingly …

The older I get the more susceptible to hypothermia I seem to be, which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve not been out much because many of these Wisconsin winter days have begun below zero. To combat cabin fever, I’ve been cataloging—and appr…

Drones in the News When I was a kid my mom told me she could always tell when I was hiding something … “It shows all over your face,” she’d say. No one, not even me, believes drones this size are a threat. So what does this have to do with the rec…

A side benefit of visiting Reading, Pennsylvania, where two of my wife’s three sons (and 6.5 of her 11.5 grandchildren) reside is catching up on the Mid Atlantic Air Museum’s restoration of its P-61 Black Widow. When I first saw the airplane in 1995…

On Monday, September 29, I completed a lifetime quest of visiting all 50 states by chasing ghosts at Brunswick Executive Airport (BXM), the former Naval Air Station Brunswick Maine. I chose it because my late father, a naval aviator, served here as …