Rocket Fighter!

Me 163B at National Museum of the USAF

It was fueled by "C-stoff", which was a combination of hydrazine hydrate and methanol, and "T-stoff", which was 85% pure hydrogen peroxide. If there was leftover fuel in the tanks on landing, it could explode. If the takeoff were aborted and the plane nosed in hard, the 275 gallon tank of hydrogen peroxide behind the cockpit could rupture, sloshing into the cockpit and turning the pilot into flieger soup.

One of the few pilots to survive the whole Me-163 program, Mano Ziegler, wrote an occasionally hair-raising memoir titled Rocket Fighter which is available cheaply on Kindle now.

Me 163B1-a at Udvar Hazy

Reverse Lend Lease

A lack of suitable night fighters saw the USAAF operating Bristol Beaufighters in the role in Europe until enough P-61 Black Widows were available to fill the ranks. The Beaufighter Mk.VIf above is painted up as the aircraft of the commander of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron circa September of 1944.

Below is a Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vc (Trop) as it would have served with the USAAF in North Africa.

Tornado

The USAF's first operational jet bomber, the four-engined North American B-45 Tornado was the main nuclear deterrent based in western Europe in the early years of the Cold War.

The B-45C at the USAF museum in Dayton is painted in the colors of the 47th Bomb Wing (Light), which was based out of RAF Sculthorpe in the 1950s. The wing had flown A-20 Havocs and A-26 Invaders in World War Two.

Thunderjet!

Designed by Alex Kartveli, the same dude who designed the P-47 Thunderbolt, the Republic F-84 Thunderjet was an early straight-winged jet fighter that started off the Korean War flying escort missions for B-29 raids but really won renown as a rugged fighter-bomber flying close air support and deep interdiction missions. Sorta like its predecessor, when you think about it...

It was the first USAF fighter capable of carrying an A-bomb and over four thousand of the things were built. It saw export success, too, being sold to fourteen nations. Some operators, like Portugal and Yugoslavia, used them into the 1970s.

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Early Bird

I really liked seeing the Bell P-59B up close at the USAF museum. Its General Electric turbojets were basically American copies of English Whittle engines and its performance was relatively uninspiring, but the Airacomet was the first operational jet fighter flown by the US Army Air Corps.

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...That You Do So Well.

Every time I see a Voodoo in the sheet metal (or in scale model form amongst other scale models) I'm reminded what a honkin' big bird it is. Seen in isolation in a photograph something about its proportions makes it look like just a li'l guy.

Originally designed to answer the need for a long-range escort fighter to accompany B-50 and B-36 bombers into Soviet airspace, it was enlarged and repurposed into an interceptor and a fighter-bomber, as well as the RF-101 photo reconnaissance plane.

The planes in the photos are both F-101B Voodoo all-weather interceptors, the most common variant of the plane, with a radar operator sitting in the back seat to guide the pilot toward Russian bomber formations. It could engage the bombers with AIM-4 Falcon guided missiles or unguided AIR-2 Genie rockets, the latter of which were equipped with nuclear warheads.

Parasites

The Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk had an actual... if brief ...service history aboard the Navy's airships USS Akron and USS Macon.

The Sparrowhawks had multiple roles. The way they operated was thus: The airship would lift off for patrol and its complement of Curtiss fighters would then take off and rendezvous with it in the air, catching the “trapeze” and being winched in to their hangars. While it seems a daunting feat, pilots said it was actually easier than trying to land on a pitching, rolling aircraft carrier deck.

Once in the hangar on the ship, the landing gear on the fighter would be removed and replaced with a 30 gallon belly tank. During the patrol, the Sparrowhawks would be used as spotter aircraft, with their on-board wireless sets, as well as functioning as a defense against attackers.

At the end of the patrol, their landing gear would be replaced and they’d launch and land ahead of the airship.

While the F9C-2 actually had an operational history, not so the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin, which was developed because there was no fighter at the time with the legs to escort B-36 Peacekeepers in the event of nukyular combat toe-to-toe with the Rooskies.

The idea behind them was that every tenth B-36 would be a fighter carrier, with three or four little teeny Goblin point-defense fighters in its belly.

In any event, it turned out to be so difficult and dangerous to launch and recover that it never got beyond the brief prototype stage. The two Goblins built accumulated a total of less than two and a half hours of flying time in seven free flights, only three of which ended with a successful hookup on the mother ship, with the remaining ones resulting in landing on the belly skid.

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Bison Hunters

With Soviet jet bombers like the Myasishchev M-4 (NATO reporting name "Bison") able to undertake intercontinental nuclear attack missions, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the United States Air Force joined forces to form NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command.

In the mid-1950s, the backbone of the air defense system was the radar-equipped all-weather jet interceptor, most frequently armed with unguided air-to-air rockets.

The Canadians used the two-seat Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck...

Its wingtip pods each packed as many as twenty-nine 2.75" folding-fin Mighty Mouse rockets. The radar operator sat behind the pilot.

One of the more interesting USAF interceptors used by NORAD was the North American F-86D "Sabre Dog".

Interesting because single-seat all-weather fighters, with the pilot serving as his own radar operator, were something of a novelty at the time. The F-86D at the USAF Museum has its ventral tray extended, showing the twenty four launch tubes for the Mk 4 "Mighty Mouse" rockets. If you look at the stand next to the plane, you can see a rocket with its fins unfolded.

Aircraft-Themed Phone Wallpaper Photos

A Sopwith Camel, a P-38 Lightning, and an SR-71 in vertical orientation, suitable for phone wallpapers...

Embiggenate and download to your heart's content (please for non-commercial use, obv...)

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SLUF

The LTV* A-7 Corsair II was nicknamed the "SLUF", for Short Little Ugly Fucker. A single seat attack aircraft developed from the F-8 fighter, it was a workhorse in Vietnam.

The one in Dayton is an A-7D, which is a version of the Navy's A-7 that was built for the USAF. Instead of the two 20mm Colt Mk. 12 cannon of the original, the D model had a single 20mm Vulcan, as well as a more powerful Allison turbofan, a fine product of Indiana.

The USAF A-7's were relegated to Air National Guard units as the F-16 came online in the Seventies, but the last combat missions flown by Navy SLUFs were in Operation Desert Storm. The Corsair II was also flown by the Greeks, Thais, and Portuguese.

*LTV was Ling-Temco-Vought, the company that resulted from a 1961 hostile takeover of the old Chance Vought corporation of F4U Corsair and F8U Crusader fame by Ling Electric, who had recently gone on a buying spree, absorbing Temco Aircraft and speaker manufacturer Altec Electronics among others.

Interwar Bombers

The Martin B-10, which first flew in prototype form in '32, went into service with the USAAF in summer of 1935. It was a sales success, with the US government buying over a hundred and export sales to China, the Dutch, Thailand, and Turkey.

We phased ours out pretty quickly at the start of WW2, but the type saw extensive combat with the Chinese, Dutch, and Thai forces, and Thailand didn't retire theirs until 1949.

It was replaced as a frontline aircraft in the USAAF inventory by the Douglas B-18 Bolo.

Most of our forward deployed B-18s were in the Philippines and got destroyed on the ground by the Japanese. Most of its wartime US service was flying anti-sub patrols along the coasts. Canada got twenty of them, which were also used for anti-submarine work, and a few went to Brazil, where they served as trainers.

The Only Two...

The Enola Gay was reassembled from storage and put on permanent display at the Udvar-Hazy museum in 2003.

When I visited in November of 2015, the way it was displayed made it nearly impossible for me to frame the entire aircraft in a photo from the floor. It's pretty crowded in there.

On the other hand, you can't help but come nose-to-nose with the only other aircraft to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. Round the corner in the World War II gallery in the USAF Museum and Bockscar is right there up in your grille.

Lockheed Snouts!

Lockheed F-94A Starfire

The other day I finally did something I've been meaning to do since I first moved to Indianapolis almost twenty years ago.

I booked a room for two nights at a Holiday Inn Express on the east side of Dayton, Ohio. While it's only a little over two hours away, this allowed me to drive out there at a leisurely pace around noon on Tuesday, grab a late lunch, and check into the hotel so that the next morning I could get to the USAF museum about the time it opened, walk until my feet couldn't take any more walking, then go back to the hotel and drive home all nicely rested at a leisurely pace on Thursday morning.

Lockheed P-38L Lightning

When I went to Udvar-Hazy back in 2015, I was shooting a Nikon D200 with an 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6 consumer zoom lens, backed up with the Coolpix P7000. Relatively speaking, I had no idea what I was doing. This time I not only had better bodies and lenses, but more importantly I had eleven years more experience taking photos.

Now to sort through the images on the cards and see what I have.

These two images are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs shot with the Canon EOS R5 and RF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

Tab Clearing...

• The state of the air war over Ukraine, four years on...


• The Rise of American Bushido


• Meta, belatedly and ineffectively, gets worried about creepers using its pervert glasses.

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Harried

Wednesday saw the official retirement of the AV-8B Harrier II V/STOL ground attack aircraft by the USMC after four decades of service.

Answers to name "Lucky"...

"The pilot of the F-15E Strike Eagle shot down April 3 over Iran was also the pilot of one of the three F-15Es shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident less than five weeks previously, making him “almost certainly” the first Air Force fixed-wing pilot to be shot down twice in the same conflict since the Vietnam war, according to current and former Air Force officials."

This is how you get given a new callsign by your peers.

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Tab Clearing...

• Norwegian F-35s tracking Russian Tu-95 Bears along NATO's northern flank.


• Real time video deepfakes make it easier to scam people live.


• The Russian school training the next generation of hackers, scammers, and influencers, all the better to mess with your mind and shape your opinions.

Rising Sun

Japan, like other democracies in the region, realizes that, despite the US talking about a "strategic pivot to Asia" for something like a decade now, it might well be on its own against China. (You know things are tense in the region if Japan and South Korea are speaking to each other.)

The latest step it's taking is legalizing arms exports, which should be an important source of income for the country, as well as making advanced arms available to nations like the Philippines.

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Tab Clearing...

• Fortunately, that will buff right out: Photos of a visibly patched-up KC-135 transiting through RAF Mildenhall en route back to CONUS for repairs.


• The Click That Cost $11,000: Google placing ads for various third party travel agency intermediaries above the links to the actual hotel is a perfect example of enshittification.


• Europe about to feel jet fuel crunch.

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History Repeats Itself

During World War Two, the Hawker Typhoon and its successor, the Tempest, were vital to the interception of German V-1 "Buzz Bombs" due to their high speed capabilities at low altitudes.

On Sunday, a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon operating as part of the joint UK-Qatari Typhoon Squadron shot down an Iranian drone, probably a Shahed, headed for Qatar.

Qatar operates two squadrons of the jets themselves, and Qatari Air Force Typhoons claimed two Iranian Su-24 Fencer "Aardvarkski" fighter bombers, which would be the first claimed air-to-air kills of the current dust-up.

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