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He posted the picture with no context.
The posted 379 victories were USAAF Spitfire victories, total RAF Spitfire victories were significantly higher...
https://worldwarwings.com/raf-tallies/
'Never in the field of human conflict was so much, owed by so many, to so few'
My interpretation from watching the radar and hearing the comms is that was either incompetence or intentional creative interpretation of the radar to solve the ROE.
While stationed at RAF Bentwaters 85-89, a few of us GI's found ourselves in the Bell Hotel in Saxmundham. Owned/operated by a WWII RAF Commander and his wonderful wife. It is quite something to know you are in the presence of one of the "few".
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The Floggers weren’t even sweeping the Tomcats. Libya’s claim that it was a training mission appears justified. But in typical navy fashion, the RIO was promoted to CAG!
The focsle follies from the ‘91 cruise were brutal. Here are the lyrics to a song sung to Nat King Cole’s “Love” and compose by an F/A-18 squadron (the “Sexual Kestrels”)
C! You cock sucking mother fuck!
A! You asshole you really suck!
G! You geek in brown shoes, comb your hair and get a real job!
CAG! You really piss us off!
Yes, that little ditty was sung in front of the airwing…
40 years in operation is a pretty solid milestone considering the tech that's been produced since its inception.
https://www.2ndmaw.marines.mil/News/Article-View/Article/4508022/vma-223-celebrates-sundown-as-marine-corps-final-harrier-squadron/
We have a B-17 and B-25 coming to town for the Fourth of July weekend.
Assuming these numbers are correct, they are most likely by US units.
The Spitfire victories are clearly those by the USAF's 31st and 52nd Fighter Groups that flew Spitfires in Tunisia and Sicily and Italy, and some US photo-recce units out of England until the end of the war.
Of these five aircraft, the only one the RAF and Commonwealth air forces did NOT fly was the P-38.
Case of Bud Lite piss says these numbers don't include P-51, P-47, P-40 victories by RAF and Commonwealth units.
Careful what you believe on the interwebs......
This thread has fallen too far down the page.
I believe that number ONLY represents the number of Spitfire victories while being flown by American pilots with our “Star & Bar” insignia, through the Lend Lease program.
The United States had units flying British Spitfires in North Africa with US markings…
You are correct that the venerable Spitfire having scored far more victories while being flown with the legendary British Roundel insignia!
🇺🇸 🫡 💥 😎 👍❗️
The B-36 Peacemaker was so huge that mechanics could actually crawl through tunnels inside the wings to reach the engines during flight. The wings were over 7 feet thick at the root, almost like part of the aircraft was a building.
And it gets even stranger: the B-36 was tested as a flying nuclear-reactor platform under the NB-36H program. It carried an operating nuclear reactor in the aircraft, not to power the plane, but to test whether a nuclear-powered bomber might be possible.
So the B-36 wasn’t just a bomber. It was a Cold War monster:
six piston engines, four jet engines, intercontinental range, nuclear weapons capability, and experiments with an onboard reactor.
Another aircraft I do not remember. 😳
Has anyone seen the Spruce Goose in person? It is unbelievably massive. It's at an Aircraft museum in Mcminiville Oregon.
Pictures of the final lineup in late 1989 or early 1990 at Beale Air Force Base.
They pulled all of the SR-71s out of hangars at Beale before its first premature, unnecessary retirement forced by jealous generals at the Pentagon.
In 1995, Congress ordered the Air Force to reinstate the SR-71s for operational missions.
The Air Force refused to assign the SR-71s any operational missions.
Tell me why the U2 is still flying? SR-71 was built to replace the U2
The U-2 was shot down 6 times. The U2 is not a fast airplane.
The SR-71 was never shot down.
The SR-71 was the fastest airplane in the world.
Don’t tell me it was about money. Do you know how much a satellite cost.. it an enormous amount.
Where do I get my information?
Ohio to Supersonic
Written by Linda Sheffield
https://aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/recon/aurora/
Dan Winters photo of the SR-71 cockpit at Castle Air Museum in Atwater, CA
Pit Row
On this day in 1938, entrepreneurial aviator Howard Hughes makes final preparations for one of aviation’s boldest flights. Within hours, he would attempt to circle the globe in his twin-engine Lockheed 14 Super Electra.
He wanted to set a record for speed, naturally, but he had another vision in mind, too.
“Hughes planned to fly around the world in a sophisticated machine supported by an expert air and ground crew,” his biographers explain. “No longer should ocean hopping be thought of as the province of daredevils. Hughes wanted to dramatize how a well-conceived, thoroughly planned, and carefully executed flight could be carried out without incident.”
Hughes was nothing if not prepared. He and his crew studied weather patterns. They installed extra radio transmitters and upgraded the engines on Hughes’s Lockheed Super Electra. Hughes had also been loaned cutting-edge navigational equipment. His navigator, Lt. Thomas L. Thurlow of the U.S. Army Air Corps, knew how to use that equipment better than anyone.
Nevertheless, Hughes faced trouble immediately upon takeoff.
“When Howard first cracked the throttles,” Thurlow later said, “it felt to me like the ship was tied.” Howard would later say that the “plane was too small to carry the load. When I took off, I had to go 125 miles an hour in order to leave the field with 25,600 pounds. . . . We had to push her up to 175 as soon as we got in the air to make her fly efficiently.”
Naturally, that speed was a problem, too. The plane was using gasoline too fast. By 2:30 a.m. on the first night, Hughes was already worried. He throttled back his engines and began working to conserve fuel. With the help of a tailwind, he reduced his usage, just barely making it into Paris. Unfortunately, he soon discovered another problem: One of the Lockheed’s tires had been damaged during the difficult New York departure.
“A mechanic at Le Bourget Airport took one look at the wheel and said to me: ‘C’est fini,’ Hughes said. “But Ed Lun, our mechanic, went to work, and who should appear to help him but a United States Army mechanic named Cook. They fixed the wheel . . . we were able to take off after about eight hours.”
It was a longer delay than Hughes had wanted, but he was off to Moscow, then Omsk. Perhaps his scariest moment came on the eastern side of Siberia. As he departed Yakutsk, his government-provided map showed a nearby mountain range at 6,500 feet.
That map could not be right! Hughes pulled up sharply, barely making it above a 9,700 foot mountain crest. “It’s a damn good thing I didn’t try to fly out of Yakutsk at night,” he later said.
By now, the end was in sight. Hughes stopped at Fairbanks, then Minneapolis. He and the crew were bone tired. They’d barely slept, taking only catnaps here and there since their July 10 departure.
Finally, the plane flew its last leg into New York. The crowd awaiting them was massive. People lined streets and sidewalks. They hung on fences. For a few minutes, the crowd even spilled onto the tarmac where Hughes was supposed to land. Fortunately, Hughes found space to bring his plane down. It was 2:37 p.m. on July 14. Hughes had completed the trip in 3 days, 19 hours, 14 minutes, and 10 seconds—a phenomenal accomplishment.
The city celebrated. As for Hughes, he was so tired that he snuck away to a hotel. He got a full night’s sleep for the first time in days.
"Snoopy" is visible on Google Maps. Go to Edwards Air Force Base and look just past the south end of the dry lake bed. There's also a couple of derelict B52s out there as well.
On December 10, 1963, Chuck Yeager pushed his rocket-powered NF-104 past 104,000 feet — over 20 miles up — chasing a new altitude record when the plane's nose refused to come back down. It snapped into a flat spin, plummeting at 9,000 feet per minute with zero engine power, forcing Yeager to eject at just 8,000 feet above the desert floor. His own ejection seat then tangled in his parachute lines, dribbling molten rocket propellant that burned straight through his helmet visor and set his face on fire mid-air. He walked away and calmly rolled up his own parachute exactly like the manual says, but what happened to his hand when he tried to peel off his glove is the detail Hollywood couldn't even fully capture 👇
🔗 https://dailytopis.com/the-true-story-of-chuck-yeagers.
The stuntman who did the jump for this scene in The Right Stuff movie actually died filming it.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Joseph_Leonard_Svec
The article says he was Special Forces, but I'm pretty sure he was actually a Navy SEAL.
Red Bull has just added this F8F Bearcat to their collection
WoW!!!!!
On September 6, 1976, Lt. Viktor Belenko landed his top-secret Soviet MiG-25 in Japan with only about 30 seconds of fuel left — and it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment escape, he'd been planning it and even smuggled out classified manuals expressly forbidden on that flight. The theft was so damaging that when the Soviets finally got the jet back, dismantled and crated, they discovered American and Japanese engineers had run the engines, mapped its infrared signature, and even left foreign fuses inside the radar by mistake. The scandal was humiliating enough that Moscow rushed an upgraded MiG-25PD into production in just two and a half years. Belenko later took US citizenship under a new name and vanished into quiet Midwestern life, and what his own son revealed decades later about the family he supposedly left behind is the twist that surprised everyone 👇
🔗 https://dailytopis.com/viktor-belenko-who-defected-to-the-west-in-a-mig-25-foxbat-jet-fighter-has-passed-away/
Awesome!
Ford Motor Company's Willow Run plant stands as one of the WWII homefront's clearest answers to a claim the aviation industry made with total confidence in 1941, that a car company had no business trying to mass-produce a bomber.
Rows of finished B-24 Liberators parked wingtip to wingtip on the airfield outside the plant were the proof. Every one came off the same mile-long line, built by a workforce that had never built an airplane before the war, running at a pace no other Liberator plant matched. Willow Run went on to build more B-24s than any single plant in America, a fact the experts who dismissed Ford's plan three years earlier would have called absurd.
This is what vindication looked like on an airfield in Michigan. Not a headline, just row after row of bombers that were not supposed to exist this fast.
Sorry G-man, not trying to one up you, but that's not the Willow Run plant. It's most likely the Dallas one.
This is the Willow Run plant at Ypsilanti airport, the production line was a mile long.
Back in 1993 I flew car parts in and out of Detroit, and recently did some digging into my murky past and found this out:
Around 18500 B-24s were built, 8685 of those at Willow Run aka Ypsilanti. The old Convair plant in San Diego produced 7034 Liberators. The rest were built in Dallas, and 964 in Tulsa by Douglas under sub-contract.
Anybody who lived in San Diego in the 1980s and 90s will remember the old Convair plant, right along I-5 at Lindbergh Field. It was closed and demolished after 1996.
Henry Ford had invented the 'production line' manufacturing method in the 1920s and he applied it to building B-24s during WW2. By 1944 the Willow Run plant produced a complete B-24 every 59 minutes.
The Willow Run B-24 plant became a GM car factory after WW2 that was finally closed in 2010, and bulldozed in 2013. The airport was named Ypsilanti and is to this day the World HQ of "freight dogs", the blue-collar underbelly of aviation. Hard core flying in old, beat-up aircraft....
US industrial power was off the scale insane, the rest of the world COMBINED couldn't touch it during WW2.
Thanks to Nixon, Clinton, Obama, the Bushes.... we now import Harley-Davidsons and medicines and tools and ships and shitty dirtbikes from China.....
A bit of video about the fait of Ozs F-111 'Pigs' :
Bit of a sad ending to them.
As I think I've written here before, the F-111 'saga' was something that went through my early years, right up to their de-commissioning.
I don't think we've now got something that could reach - And Return : our F35s wouldn't do the job - from a 'run' to that funnily named country mentioned in the video - for those of the 'panicked' persuasion, it's he largest Islamic population on Earth. Russia keeps on sidling up to them, and we are on the Rusky list of 'Unfriendly Countries' AKA : Enemies'.
When you watch that video you can see how far back that nose landing gear is from pitot tube on the nose. When a fella is marshalling a plane, any plane, into a parking spot he's looking to put those nose landing gear tires on a painted spot on the ramp. That ensures adequate room for other planes and equipment to move around without without shit getting fucked up.
(I said all that for the folks that might not know the minutiae of aircraft ground handling)
Anyway, here's the funny part. We got a new crew chief that transfered in from A-10's. He was used to standing pretty close to that nose wheel "spot" when marshelling a plane in to park. Well, he lost the spot under that long snout. Long story short...he marshalled that 111 pilot tube right into his forehead...twice.
I guess you had to be there.🙃
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