Robert Novell

An Aviation Legend, Gone but not Forgotten – May 22, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:48:00 +0000

RN3DB

May 22, 2026

Good Morning to all and to all Happy Friday,

This week I am going to once again highlight a man who I consider to be a cornerstone for the success of aviation, in our era, although the results of his efforts, and tireless spirit, can never be truly measured. Aviators have a proud tradition to build on, that is unequaled by any other country, and for those who will carry on this tradition rest assured you will be standing on the shoulders of Robert Hoover, and men like him, to take those accomplishments to the next level.

The Living Legends of Aviation Awards is produced by the Kiddie Hawk Air Academy, which is a non-profit organization located in Littleton, Colorado, and is dedicated to introducing, educating, and sparking children’s interest in aviation. The Kiddie Hawk Trainers give children ages 4 to 9 a sense of flight, albeit only a few feet off the ground, and it is their mission to give children the “spark” they need to help create the next generation of aviators and aviation Legends.

Enjoy…………………………………

Robert “Bob” Hoover

(Promoter/Test Pilot – Enshrined in to the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988)

Robert A. Hoover has thrilled millions of men, women and children over the last five decades with his acrobatic flying maneuvers. In addition, he has flown over 300 types of aircraft and flight tested or flown nearly every type of fighter aircraft.

Hoover was born in Nashville, Tennessee on January 24th, 1922. He learned to fly at Nashville’s Berry Field and worked at a grocery store to earn the money required for flight instructions. Almost immediately, Hoover began to try his hand at rolls and loops and taught himself aerobatics. The young pilot then enlisted in the Tennessee National Guard and was later received orders to Army Pilot Training School.

At the time that Hoover graduated, World War II was in full swing and the Allied invasion of North Africa had begun. Hoover’s first assignment was in Casablanca, Morocco, where he tested planes before they were sent into combat. Hoover’s next assignment was in Corsica with the 52nd Fighter Group, one of two Spitfire outfits in the Army’s Air Forces. After flying 58 missions, he was shot down off the coast of southern France and spent sixteen months in a German prison camp.

Upon his return to the United States after the war, Hoover was assigned to the Flight Evaluation Group at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. There he flew Japanese and German airplanes captured during the war. He also flew the latest aircraft being tested by the United States Air Force.

Hoover accepted a position with General Motors in 1948 as a test pilot for high altitude performance testing of Allison jet engines and the development of propellers. In 1950, Hoover would begin a 36-year association with North American Aviation and Rockwell International. He performed experimental flight test work on the Navy FJ-2 jet fighter and then the F-86D and the F-100. Hoover demonstrated the safe handling and flying qualities of the F-86 and F-100 series fighters to pilots all over the world.

Bob Hoover was the first man to fly the XFJ-2 Fury Jet and the Navy’s T-28 trainer. He is also the holder of several aviation records. In 1978, he set three climb-to-altitude records at Hanover Air Show in West Germany. And in 1985, he set a coast-to-coast record flying a P-51 from Daytona Beach to Los Angeles in five hours and twenty minutes.

During his career, Hoover has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Soldiers Medal, Air Medal and Purple Heart. He is the only person to serve two terms as president of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and was captain of the United States Aerobatic Team in the 1966 International Competition in Moscow.

His famous yellow P-51 has been one of the main attractions at the Reno Air Races. His performances in the Shrike Commander have thrilled audiences as he swoops, rolls, loops and finally maneuvers the aircraft to a landing following his famed energy management sequence with no engines running.

Source Document

Robert A (Bob) Hoover

(The annual Living Legends gala at the Beverly Hilton – January 24, 2012)

Robert A. “Bob” Hoover, the “greatest stick-and-rudder pilot who ever lived,” according to General James Doolittle, was honored at the annual Living Legends gala at the Beverly Hilton. Hoover reflected on his life experiences with the characteristic graciousness that also distinguishes him as the consummate Tennessee gentleman.

Hoover’s “infatuation with aviation” started in 1927 he learned of Charles Lindbergh’s non-stop flight across the north Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. He told the crowd at Living Legends that his childhood heroes were Lindbergh, Roscoe Turner [and his pet lion], Eddie Rickenbacker and especially Jimmy Doolittle.

Fast forward to the early 1950s. Hoover was signing autographs at after performing in the F-86 at an airshow in Europe when an unassuming gentleman in the crowd introduced himself as Mr. Schwartz. The man asked Hoover if he could speak with him. Hoover told Mr. Schwartz that he’d have to wait until he finished signing autographs.

Mr. Schwartz waited patiently for Hoover to attend to his fans for nearly two hours. When the two finally met, it was apparent that Mr. Schwartz actually was the reclusive Charles Lindbergh in disguise.

Hoover’s jaw dropped. He had kept Charles Lindbergh waiting while he signed photos. Lindbergh wanted to discuss with Hoover the future of jets at Pan Am where he served on the board of directors. A bond between the two soon developed and Hoover helped Mr. Schwartz maintain anonymity while he explored new technologies with top aerospace companies, including North American Aircraft.

In 1969, Hoover was head of the Society of Experimental Text Pilots and he was charged with organizing SETP’s big celebration dinner. A once in a blue moon opportunity arose. Hoover had a long-shot chance of orchestrating the appearance of two of America’s biggest aviation heroes.

Hoover said the dinner was held in the very same ballroom at the Beverly Hilton as the Living Legends dinner. He was presiding over the ceremony at the same place on the stage behind the podium.

Seated at the head table, were the reclusive Mr. Schwartz [aka Charles Lindbergh] and Neil Armstrong, just back from the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. In the middle of the two was Hoover’s wife Colleen.

When Hoover brought up the house lights and introduced Lindbergh and Armstrong to the SETP members, they were awestruck at the sight of the two air and space pioneers.

The media was just as awestruck. They assumed Lindbergh never made public appearances and that Armstrong was still in quarantine after returning to earth. When the wire services and other media saw Lindbergh and Armstrong together they snapped hundreds of photos and sent them all over the world.

The photos all showed Bob’s wife Colleen, right in the middle of Lindbergh and Armstrong.

“It was the proudest moment of my life,” Hoover says. “There was dear Colleen, now my wife of 65 years, together with two of my biggest heroes. Her picture with them was seen all over the world.”

“To this day, I assume she is the only person to have sat with the first man to cross the Atlantic in an airplane on one side and the first man to set foot on the moon on the other,” Hoover writes in his autobiography Forever Flying.

That moment, is so emblematic of Bob Hoover. He speaks infrequently of his many accomplishments as a barnstormer, World War II fighter pilot, USAF and North American Aircraft jet test pilot and air show performer during his 60+ year flying career. He’d much rather laud others for their feats and stand on the sidelines as a humble spectator.

He also calls virtually all his friends on special occasions, such as birthdays and Christmas. Imagine my shock when, out of the blue, my hero Bob Hoover first called me several years ago on December 24 to wish me a Merry Christmas while I was driving on Pacific Coast Highway. I was so awestruck, I nearly crashed my car. That tradition has continued ever since, but now I’m less likely to lose control.

Source Document

Enjoy the weekend, enjoy time away from aviation with family and friends, but most importantly, enjoy life – it is a short ride and tomorrow morning when we awake the ride is one day closer to being finished.

Robert Novell

May 22, 2026

The Wright Brothers After Kitty Hawk – May 15, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:00:00 +0000

RN3DB

May 16, 2026

Good Morning,

Hope all is well with you and yours and welcome back to the 3DB. This week I want to talk about the Wright Brothers after Kitty Hawk; however, before I talk about the Wrights after Kitty Hawk lets talk about the Wrights before Kitty Hawk.

Enjoy……

The Wrights

Before, And After, Kitty Hawk

Orville Wright

(August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948)

Aviator and inventor, Orville was born in Dayton, Ohio, to Milton and Susan Koerner Wright. He was the sixth of seven children born to the Wrights, five of whom survived infancy. Orville attended school in Iowa, Indiana, and Dayton, where future poet Paul Laurence Dunbar was part of his class at Central High School. However, Orville never graduated from high school, having not earned several credits required for a diploma. Having already decided to pursue a career as a printer, Orville was not worried about lacking a diploma; instead, he and Wilbur established a printing shop near their home in west Dayton.

Source Document

Wilbur Wright

April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912

Aviator and inventor, Wilbur was born near Millville, Indiana, to Milton Wright and Susan Koerner. He was the third of seven children born to the Wrights, five of whom survived infancy. Wilbur moved often as a child due to his father’s ministry in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and he attended primary schools in Iowa and Indiana. He attended high school in Richmond, Indiana, but did not receive his diploma with the rest of the class of 1884 as his family moved to Dayton, Ohio, before his commencement ceremonies. In Dayton, Wilbur enrolled in the college preparatory program at Central High School, but a freak hockey injury during the winter of 1885-1886 caused him to convalesce at home for three years. During those years he nursed his ill mother, who died of tuberculosis in 1889, and read widely in his father’s extensive library.

Source Document

Orville and Wilbur

The Quest -From Beginning To End

In 1889, Wilbur and brother Orville – four years his junior – decided to form a business partnership and open a printing shop. Between May of 1889 to August of 1890, they published two local newspapers, the West Side News and the Evening Item. The newspapers failed in a saturated journalistic market, but their printing shop fared better. In 1890, they moved it to new quarters in the recently-built Hoover Block on West Third Street near the Wright family home. It was there that the Wrights printed the Dayton Tattler, a short-lived newspaper for the local African American community that was edited by a high school acquaintance of Orville’s, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar later gained national renown for his poetry.

Though printing became an overly predictable business to Wilbur and Orville, they maintained their shop until 1899, when they sold their press and type. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1893, they responded to the bicycling craze sweeping the United States by opening a bicycle repair and sales shop. Business at the cycle shop boomed, and it overtook the printing shop to become their primary business. While other companies produced most of the bicycles the Wrights sold, they also sold cycles made at their own shop. Few bicycles built by the Wrights exist today. The Wrights left the bicycle business in 1908.

Milton piqued the interests of Wilbur and Orville in aviation in 1878, when he gave them a toy helicopter after one of his trips in the west. The 1896 death of German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal in a glider crash, rekindled the brothers’ latent interests in flying. Drawing upon similarities between bicycling and flying, Wilbur and Orville began researching aerodynamics, propulsion, and control. Their research did not occur in a vacuum; they investigated the experiments of other aviation pioneers, writing to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for suggestions of relevant readings in 1899. The Wrights progressed from kite to glider research and, valuing privacy while needing consistently high winds, moved glider experimentation to the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Research and development activities took place at the cycle shop on West Third Street in Dayton. Through experimentation at the cycle shop using a small, homemade wind tunnel, the Wrights designed the airplane that made the first powered, controlled, sustained flight on December 17, 1903. Experimentation and flight testing over the next decade at Huffman Prairie (Huffman Prairie Flying School adjoins Wright Patterson AFB), eight miles (13 km) east of Dayton, and at Kitty Hawk, resulted in the development of practical airplanes that could remain airborne for as long as fuel reserves permitted.

Orville and Wilbur were wary of competitors copying their designs while patents pended and did not fly between late 1905 and the spring of 1908. Orville returned to the air that spring to conduct airplane trials for the U.S. Army, while Wilbur ventured to France to conduct trials for potential French investors. The Wrights signed a contract with the U.S. Army stating that they would provide an airplane capable of flying for one hour at a speed of forty miles per hour (64 km/h) for $25,000 without performance incentives. While the trials at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, were generally successful, one flight ended abruptly when Orville’s plane crashed. The accident seriously injured Orville and killed his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. Orville’s injuries, which included a broken thigh and broken pelvis, gave him pain for the remainder of his life. He and sister Katharine joined Wilbur in France after his injuries healed.

In 1909, the Wrights and several prominent industrialists created the Wright Company to market Wright airplanes. Wilbur became the company’s first president, with Orville as one of two vice-presidents (Andrew Freedman being the other). Orville became president of the Wright Company upon Wilbur’s death of typhoid fever in 1912. Orville also served as executor of his brother’s estate.

In the years after Wilbur’s death, Orville became an elder statesman among aviators. He, Katharine, and Milton moved into Hawthorn Hill, a mansion in the Dayton suburb of Oakwood, in 1914. Orville sold his interests in the Wright Company in 1915, remaining with it for a year as a consulting engineer. He also built a laboratory on Broadway in west Dayton, close to the last site of the Wrights’ cycle shop and the family’s former home at 7 Hawthorne Street. Orville worked on a variety of projects at this laboratory, designing devices to ease tasks around Hawthorn Hill. He also served on several aviation commissions and boards, including that of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the predecessor agency of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Orville, who never married, died in Dayton of a heart attack on January 30, 1948 and is buried at Woodland Cemetery.

Huffman Prairie Flying Field

When the Wright brothers returned to Dayton, after their historic first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, they looked for a suitable flying field closer to home. Dayton banker, Torrence Huffman allowed the brothers to use his pasture, which was located eight miles northeast of Dayton, rent-free. Here in 1904 and 1905, through a series of unique experiments, the Wright brothers mastered the principles of controlled, powered flight and developed the world’s first practical airplane.

In 1904, the brothers made 105 flights, totaling 49 minutes in the air with their 1904 Wright Flyer II. With this flying machine, they made the first turn and the first circle in the air. They also employed a starting derrick for the first time and Wilbur set a new distance record.

When the brothers returned to the Huffman Prairie for the 1905 flying season, they brought along an improved machine, the 1905 Wright Flyer III. This flying machine, which evolved throughout 1905, could bank, turn circles, and make figure-eights. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur piloted the plane for a world record of over 24 miles in 39 minutes. About two weeks later, the brothers ended their experiments for 1905 feeling that they now had a practical airplane that they could market. In the 1905 flying season, the brothers stayed aloft for 262 minutes in just 50 flights.

The Wright brothers returned to Huffman Prairie Flying Field in 1910. The field was used by their new business, The Wright Company, as a testing ground, flying school, and home to their exhibition team. The Wright Company ceased use of the flying field in 1916.

Today, Huffman Prairie Flying Field is located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

Source Document

Tomorrow I am off to The Wrights Shop in Dayton, make a visit to their graves of the Brothers Wright, and then to the Air Force Museum. Have a good weekend, keep family and friends close, and stop by again next week when we will talk about ?????

Robert Novell

May 16, 2026

Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc. – Aviation Ads Open a Window to the Past – May 8, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:00:00 +0000

RN3DB

May 8, 2026

Good Morning,

This week I want to look back at the aviation industry by using ads from the fifties…..enjoy.

Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc.

I hope you enjoyed this look back in time and as always, take a few minutes each day to reflect back on your roots as an aviator and help me identify what we, as “Gatekeepers of the Third Dimension,” need to do to protect our profession.

(The preceding ads are presented for educational purposes and cannot be reproduced or used for any other purpose.)

Robert Novell
May 8, 2026

Charley and The Wright Brothers – May 1, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

RN3DB

May 1, 2026

Good Morning,

Happy Friday and welcome back. Today we are going to talk about the man who made the Wright Brothers a success and then drifted into obscurity. The man – Charles E. Taylor – designed and built the engine for the Wright Flyer, helped develop the first wind tunnel, and he never sought notoriety from his work with the Wrights and few ever recognized his contributions.

This article is a reprint from late last year but the story of Charley needs to be kept alive and here at the 3DB we will do our part to preserve his memory.

Enjoy……………………

Charles “Charley” Taylor

(Aviation’s First Mechanic of Powered Flight)

When we think of the first powered flight we automatically think of Wilbur and Orville Wright; however, there was a third person involved whose skills were an essential part of the Wright’s success. Charles “Charley” Taylor was that man and without his help the Wright Brothers may have lost their place in history.

Charley was born in Illinois in 1868 and at the age of twelve quit school to find his place in life. He quickly learned that his hands, and tools, were almost one in the same, and America’s first aviation mechanic for powered flight started down a path in life that would have him working for the Wright brothers and building the first engine for the Wright Flyer.

Charley started to work for the Wright brothers on June 15, 1901, doing routine repairs on bicycles, so that the Wright brothers could pursue their experiments with gliders which included many trips to Kitty Hawk. After one of these trips, the brothers decided they needed more accurate information and decided they needed to build a small wind tunnel. With this, they would measure the amount, and direction, of air pressures on plane and curved surfaces operating at various angles and improve their theories based on their gliding experiences.

Building the wind tunnel was the first job that Charley Taylor did for the Wright brothers that had any connection with aeronautics. The wind tunnel was a rectangular box with a fan at one end driven by a natural gas engine. The Wright brothers did many experiments in their wind tunnel and from this data they began to make their 1902 glider with Charlie machining many of the parts.

On August 13, 1902, the brothers shipped the glider to Kitty Hawk. They did several flights with the glider and on October 31, 1902, the Wrights returned to Dayton to make plans for a powered airplane. Through their experiments, the Wrights were able to accurately predict the horsepower which was needed to produce and achieve powered flight. The next problem was where to get a light engine that would produce eight horsepower. The Wrights knew that a steam engine might suit their purpose, but a gasoline engine would be safer and more efficient.

In December of 1902, the Wrights sent letters to almost a dozen automobile companies, and gasoline engine manufacturers, asking if they could produce or modify an engine that would develop eight to nine brake horsepower, weigh no more than 180 pounds, and be free from vibration. Most companies replied that they were too busy to undertake building such a special engine. Falling back on their own mechanical experience, the Wright brothers decided to design and build their own engine.

They estimated they could build a four cylinders engine, with four inch stroke and four inch bore weighing no more than 200 pounds with accessories included, and by their calculations it would develop the horsepower necessary to power the glider in flight. Now the problem was who was going to build the engine; however, that problem was quickly solved when the brothers decided to give the task to Charley.

Charley was excited about his new challenge, and from his knowledge of mechanics, and design, he knew that the engine design was basic, straight forward, and simple. Charley had very limited knowledge about gasoline engines, but he used his craftsmanship, genius, and enthusiasm to tackle the task. Without any formal drawings available it was necessary for each part to be crudely sketched out by the Wrights, or Charlie, on a piece of paper, and after a thorough discussion with the brothers, Charley would pin the drawing above his workbench and go to work. Using these sketches, and specifications, he finished the engine in six weeks.

Now, you would think that Charley’s accomplishments up to this point would be sufficient to satisfy most aviation pioneers but it wasn’t to be. After the successful flight of 1903 Wilbur and Orville decided to have Charley build a more powerful engine and they started work on an improved airframe. When the new Flyer was ready they received permission to fly it at a pasture near Dayton called Huffman Prairie. The flying was more difficult there and the Wrights crashed numerous times and Charley was heard to say, “Every time one of the brothers goes up I expect it to be the last time I’ll see him alive.” However, because Charley devoted most of his time to maintaining the airplanes and facilities at Huffman Prairie Charley actually became the first Airport Manager in US aviation history.

There were several other major accomplishments in Charley’s career that I will notate at the conclusion of my story but for now I want tell you how this forgotten pioneer of aviation faded into obscurity and died a lonely man.

After Wilbur died in May of 1912, of Typhoid fever, the pioneering days of the Wright Brothers were finished. Charley traveled to California to look for work, during the Great Depression, and found a job as a factory mechanic. He invested what money he had in a few hundred acres of land near the Salton Sea and waited to make his fortune – nothing happened and he lost everything.

In 1937 he went to Greenfield Village and restored the Wrights’ bicycle shop, and home, to their 1903 condition and built a replica of the first engine. He later returned to California during the war and at the age of 73 went to work making cartridge shells but in 1945 Charley suffered a heart attack and was never able to work again. Now, all alone, the last of the original three men who had built the first successful airplane, he was almost destitute.

In November 1955, a reporter discovered Charlie in a Los Angles General Hospital’s charity ward. His income was his Social Security check and an $800 a year annuity fund belatedly established by Orville Wright before his death in 1948. The aviation community immediately started a campaign to raise funds for Charlie and he was moved to a private sanitarium where he died a few months later on January 30, 1956 at the age of 88. Having no close relatives Charles E. Taylor was buried in the Portal of Folded Wings Mausoleum dedicated to aviation pioneers, located in Valhalla Memorial Park, Los Angeles.

Portal of the Folded Wings

The Portal of the Folded Wings is located just south of the Burbank airport in beautiful Valhalla Memorial Park. Originally built in 1924, (6 years before United Airport/Burbank was built) it was once the grand entrance to the memorial park.

On December 17, 1953 (the 50th anniversary of powered flight) the Portal was dedicated as a “Shrine to Aviation” and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

24 Aviation Pioneers are laid to rest in the

Portal of the Folded Wings

Shrine to Aviation

Bertrand B. Acosta, co-pilot with Admiral Richard Byrd in 1927

Walter R. Brookins, flew for the Wright brothers.

Mark M. Campbell, stunt pilot and aircraft designer.

Col. Warren S. Eaton, early pilot who also built airplanes for Lincoln Beachy.

W. Bertrum Kinner, built ‘Kinner’ airplanes. Amelia Earhart flew a Kinner.

A. Roy Knabenshue, balloon and dirigible pilot who flew in the Dominguez Air Meet in 1910.

Elizabeth L. McQueen, one of Los Angeles’s first women pilots.

John B. Moisant, won the Statue of Liberty Race in 1910; first to carry a passenger across the English Channel.

Matilde J. Moisant, the second licensed female pilot in the United States in 1911.

J. Floyd Smith, test pilot and instructor for Glenn Martin and manufacturer of parachutes.

Hilder F. Smith, aerial acrobat and parachute jumper.

Carl B. Squier, WWI aviator, barnstormer, test pilot, and salesman. As Vice President of Lockheed Aircraft he sold Charles and Anne Lindbergh their Sirius airplane in 1931.

Charles E. Taylor, machinist for the Wright brothers who helped design and build the first engine for the Wright Flyer flown at Kitty Hawk.

Source Document

So, what were Charlie’s major accomplishments?

He was one of the three men responsible for the “First Flight.”
He was the first aviation mechanic in powered flight.
He was Calbraith Perry Rodgers’ mechanic on his monumental transcontinental flight in 1911.
He was the first man to fill the position of “Airport Manager.”
He was one of the first men to be actively involved in accident investigation and as a result he improved his skills/product as well as the design of the Wright Brother’s future craft.

Charlie never sought notoriety from his work with the Wrights and few ever recognized his contributions. He was never a part of aviation’s inner circle nor was he ever invited to attend any of the big celebrations held in honor of the Wrights. It seems that if anyone had ever thought much about Charley they didn’t take the time to find him. Gone but not forgotten – Happy Friday Charley and thanks for making my world of aviation possible.

Have a good weekend, enjoy time with friends and family, and enjoy some summer time fun before the cold weather begins to settle in.

Robert Novell

May 1, 2026

We All know About the Lone Eagle but What About Beryl Markam April 24, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:52:00 +0000

RN3DB

April 24, 2026

Good Morning,

I suspect you may be wondering what the connection is between the two people mentioned in the title, but there is a connection. They are both pioneers of the Atlantic but no one remembers Ms. Markham. Today I want to tell you her story…..enjoy.

(Little-remembered today, the adventurous Kenya bush pilot outdid her contemporary Amelia Earhart by flying the Atlantic solo the hard way)

Beryl Markham

The small single-engine monoplane emerged from the Atlantic sky and, nearly out of fuel, flew low over the inhospitable, boulder-strewn Nova Scotian landscape.

Desperately seeking a place to land and weary after more than 21 hours at the controls, the pilot set the monoplane down on what appeared to be a solid surface. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a soggy peat bog. Seconds later, the plane nosed over, the pilot suffering a gash to her forehead. Extracting herself with difficulty from the cockpit, the tall blonde aviator promptly found herself up to her shins in glutinous mud. No matter. She was safe, if desperately short of sleep and ravenous after eating only a packet of chicken sandwiches during the entire flight. It was September 5, 1936, and she had just become the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo the hard way—from east to west, against the prevailing winds. She was also the first person to fly directly across the Atlantic from England. Her name was Beryl Markham and, as a bush pilot from Kenya, she was well outside her equatorial comfort zone.

Born Beryl Clutterbuck on October 26, 1902, in the English village of Ashwell, she had moved with her family to colonial British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) at the age of 4. Unlike her mother who, disliking the isolation, soon headed back to England, young Beryl thrived amid the hardships and challenges of settler life. Often left to her own devices while her ex-soldier father developed their farm and horse-racing stable, she formed friendships with the African farm workers’ children, learning to speak their tribal languages and becoming fluent in Swahili. Barefoot and clutching a spear, she joined hunting parties as they scoured the bush for game. The fearless and strongly independent youngster even opted to sleep in her own mud hut. Like the father she hero-worshipped, she was an accomplished rider and, in her late teens, became Kenya’s first female licensed racehorse trainer.

Three times married and divorced, in later life she used the surname of her second husband, Mansfield Markham, with whom she had her only child, a son, Gervase. As someone with a decidedly relaxed attitude toward her wedding vows, the whiff of scandal seemed to follow the vivacious Mrs. Markham around like a comet’s tail. An awed Kenyan contemporary described her as “A magnificent creature, very feline. It was like watching a golden lioness when she walked across the room.”

But it was not until 1931, after making several flights with the renowned professional hunter Denys Finch Hatton, that Markham caught the flying bug. She asked Finch Hatton to teach her to fly, but as a relative novice himself, he sensibly declined. Markham then turned to another friend, the debonair Captain Tom Campbell Black, a Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and Royal Air Force (RAF) veteran then working as the managing director and chief pilot of the Nairobi-based Wilson Airways. Under his painstaking instruction in a de Havilland DH.60 Gipsy Moth biplane, she soon began to show a precocious natural ability in the air. So close did the flying bond between Markham and Campbell Black become that she would always regard him as her mentor and guide in all aviation matters. They even talked of emulating British record-setters Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison as a way to fame and fortune. Although still married, Markham soon became involved in a long-term affair with Campbell Black.

To build up her flying hours, Markham bought an Avro Avian IV two-seater biplane, soon to be repainted in her blue-and-silver horse-racing colors. In April and May 1932, with only 127 hours in her logbook, she flew the tiny airplane 6,000 miles by stages, with several forced landings, via the Sudan and Egypt across the Mediterranean and Europe to England. Months later she flew back to Kenya, completing an astonishing feat of airmanship and navigation for someone so relatively inexperienced. As a token life-preserver while crossing the Mediterranean, she wore an inflated inner-tube!

Markham obtained her commercial license in September 1933 with just under a thousand hours in her logbook. Her early commercial work included taking joyriding tourists in the Avian along the Mombasa coastline. She delivered mail and supplies to the goldmines of Kakamega in western Kenya, often using tiny airstrips hacked from the featureless bush by the miners themselves. Markham also flew in doctors and medical supplies to isolated farms and bush outposts. Although it was a hazardous way of earning a living, she thrived on the daily challenges.

By late 1933 she had started to work as an aerial big-game spotter for hunting safaris, a technique pioneered by Finch Hatton and Campbell Black, but taken to new levels of precision by Markham. These hunting safaris were big business in 1930s East Africa, attracting wealthy clients, including royalty, from Europe and America.

As the first pilot to offer aerial game-scouting on a commercial basis, Markham specialized in finding elephants, although she was always prepared to search for any game animals on a client’s trophy list, including lion, buffalo and rhino. Her directional instructions, dropped to the hunters in leather message bags, were meticulous in the extreme, detailing the animal and herd size, the density of the surrounding bush, the distance away from the hunting party and a precise compass bearing to follow. More often than not, she worked for safaris led by her professional hunter friend, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, former husband of Karen Blixen, author of the classic Out of Africa. Markham herself was never interested in big-game trophy hunting, preferring to photograph the animals.

When the safari season ended, Markham used her Avian as an aerial taxi for upcountry residents. Later, to increase her operating capacity, she acquired a three-seater DH.85 Leopard Moth high-wing cabin monoplane.

In October 1934, Markham received news that Campbell Black and Charles Scott had won the prestigious Mildenhall-to-Melbourne MacRobertson Air Race flying the DH.88 Comet Grosvenor House. This was one of the contests that she had hoped to enter with Campbell Black. Not long after she learned that he had married actress Florence Desmond.

Deeply upset, Markham determined to demonstrate that her piloting skills were the equal of Campbell Black’s and his record-setting contemporaries. She wanted to set a record that would resonate around the world, conceivably the London–Cape Town–London route, or some form of transatlantic record.

These ambitions began to crystallize in February 1935 when Markham sold her Avian to finance another trip to England. Once there she hoped to persuade Campbell Black to join her in a record attempt on the Cape Town route or, failing that, to go it alone by finding a rich backer to finance a solo record attempt.

But it was not until March 1936 that, accompanied by Bror Blixen, Markham left Kenya in her Leopard Moth to reprise her 1932 flight to England. Although Campbell Black had offered to arrange interviews for several flying jobs in Britain, she sought something more than that: an objective that would make the headlines of the world’s newspapers.

Ironically, when eventually she found a wealthy patron, it turned out to be an old Kenya settler friend, John C. Carberry, who had been a member of Britain’s 1914 Schneider Trophy team and later served in the RNAS. Carberry was in England at that time, awaiting the completion of a Percival Vega Gull he was having built to compete in the Schlesinger African Air Race between Portsmouth and Johannesburg, scheduled for late September 1936. Impulsively he offered the Vega Gull to Markham for an east-west solo transatlantic attempt, conditional on her getting it back to England in time for him to compete in the Schlesinger. She readily agreed.

Jim Mollison had made the first westward solo crossing of the North Atlantic, on August 18-19, 1932, flying between Ireland and Canada in a DH.80A Puss Moth. Mollison had been aiming for New York and so judged the flight a partial failure. Markham also decided to head for New York but, on Carberry’s advice, chose to start from England.

The Vega Gull, dubbed The Messenger, was an elegant low-wing, fabric-covered, four-seater monoplane, powered by a 200-hp de Havilland Gipsy Six II engine driving a Ratier variable-pitch propeller. In standard configuration it had a 174-mph maximum speed, 150-mph cruising speed and a range of about 660 miles. For Markham’s transatlantic flight, several extra fuel tanks were fitted, including two in the cabin, to take on the 255 gallons of gasoline needed to reach New York, giving a theoretical range of about 3,800 miles. The fixed undercarriage was specially strengthened to carry the extra load. All the supplementary tanks were controlled by hand-operated petcocks. The cabin tanks had no gauges, but each contained enough fuel for about four hours. Markham was cautioned that proper use of the petcocks to control the flow of fuel was vital. Were she to open one without first shutting the other, an airlock might result, blocking the fuel flow. There was no room in the Gull’s cabin for a radio.

Campbell Black spent many hours helping Markham with her training regime and detailed preflight planning. To obtain firsthand knowledge of the conditions she was likely to encounter along the route, he also introduced her to Jim Mollison, who soon became a close friend. They chose RAF Abingdon, with its mile-long runway, as the departure point.

Adverse North Atlantic weather delayed the departure until 1850 hours (BST) on September 4, 1936, when Markham, in the pilot’s seat for only the third time, took off in The Messenger and headed west toward Ireland and the vast Atlantic. Among the onlookers, Mollison and airplane designer Edgar Percival watched approvingly as she coolly held the Gull down until it gathered sufficient speed to lift its heavy load. Campbell Black was away, apparently because he doubted she would fly in such unfavorable weather. “Well, that’s the last we’ll see of Beryl,” quipped Mollison to Percival. Nonetheless, as an optimistic token, Mollison had loaned Markham the cherished wristwatch he had used on his successful transatlantic flights.

Nothing was heard of the Gull until 2225 BST, when it was observed overflying Castletown, Ireland, 328 miles from Abingdon. In her autobiography, West With the Night, Markham recalled of this time in the flight: “We are bound for a point thirty-six hundred miles from here – two thousand of it unbroken ocean. Most of it will be by night….I am flying along the Great Circle Course for Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, into a forty mile headwind at a speed of 130 mph.”

She had been flying on a cabin tank estimated to last four hours when suddenly, she wrote, “My motor coughs and dies and the Gull is powerless.” For some 30 heart-stopping seconds, while the monoplane sank toward the waves, Markham grappled frantically with awkward petcocks until at last “the motor explodes into life again.”

As Markham flew on, interminable dark and monotonous hours of instrument flying in the cramped cockpit were at last ended when she sighted “A lighted ship – the daybreak – some steep cliffs. The meaning of these will never change for a pilot….I felt the elation I had so long imagined….We had flown blind for nineteen hours.” It was a magnificent feat of navigation. The ship was the SS Spaarndam, which reported sighting the Gull at 1400 BST, some 200 miles from Newfoundland, headed west.

Soon after the Gull was spotted circling the Cape Race lighthouse on the southeastern tip of Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula before heading for the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. “After a while there would be New Brunswick, Maine and then New York,” Markham wrote. “…Four hundred miles of water, but then again land at Cape Breton. I would stop at Sydney to refuel and go on….New York was my goal.”

Fate, meanwhile, had another card to play. “My engine began to shudder before I saw the land. It died. It spluttered, it started again and limped along. Airlock, I thought.” Hoping she might clear the airlock by turning the empty tanks on and off, she cut her hands on the sharp metal petcocks, blood dripping onto her maps and clothes, to no avail. The engine ran on intermittently until at last, over Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton, an estimated 12 minutes from Sydney airfield, it cut out completely, leading to that tail-up landing in the Baleine Cove peat bog. (The “airlock” was later attributed to ice lodged in the air intake of the last petrol tank, partially choking the fuel flow to the carburetor.) Since departing England, Markham had covered an extraordinary 2,612 miles in 21 hours and 35 minutes.

Rescued by local fishermen, she was taken to a telephone, from which she reported to Sydney airfield. Next day, her forehead bandaged, she was flown to Halifax and a civic reception. Waiting at the airfield was a U.S. Coast Guard Beechcraft 17, which flew her to Floyd Bennett Field, where a rapturous crowd welcomed her. Over the following packed days, the glamorous, party-loving Markham delighted in New York’s generous hospitality and tickertape welcome. But then came the shattering news that Tom Campbell Black was dead, killed on September 19 at Liverpool Airport in a ground collision between the Percival Mew Gull he was intending to pilot in the Schlesinger Race and an RAF Hawker Hart light bomber.

The trusting John Carberry, of course, never did get to fly his Vega Gull in the Schlesinger. After it was extracted from the Nova Scotian mud, it was shipped back to England and then East Africa, where it was sold to Dar-es-Salaam Airways.

Markham returned to England where, over the ensuing years, she was frequently reported as entering races or seeking sponsorship for record attempts. But nothing ever came of it. Nor did she show any interest in returning to bush flying. It was as if Campbell Black’s tragic death had deprived her of a vital motivational spark—as if she no longer had anything to prove.

She went back to the United States in 1939, living there until 1950, when the siren call of Africa drew her back to Kenya and, eventually, to another period as one of the country’s most successful racehorse trainers. She died in Nairobi on August 3, 1986, aged 83.

Today, Beryl Markham and her epic transatlantic flight are all but forgotten. Few can doubt, however, that had this extraordinary woman so chosen, with her courage, gritty self-confidence and flying skills, she could have ranked alongside such aviation greats as Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson and Jean Batten.

Source Document

Have a good weekend, relax and enjoy the first day of 2021, and come back next week when we will talk about another pioneer in aviation.

Robert Novell

April 24, 2026

Aviators of WW II – April 17, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:02:00 +0000

RN3DB

April 17, 2026

Good Evening,

I hope everyone is ready for a weekend of fun and relaxation but if you have to work then hopefully you can kick back later in the week with family and friends. Today I want to take you back in time to a story of a man who made aviation his life and enjoyed a successful career in the USAF.

Enjoy…..

Blaine Mack – P38 Pilot
Aleutian Islands

I was born in Portland, Sept 30, 1924, but moved to Astoria, Oregon while still an infant and attended school in Astoria during the depression. The family needed money so I took a job delivering papers at age 13. On December 12, 1937 the Japanese sunk our ship, the USS Panay. Mom was not happy to hear me say that “I was going to be in this war.” When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, I was a senior in high school and knew then I would be involved.

Upon graduation, June 1942, I wanted to fly but I needed two years of college to qualify and I also had to be 18 years old. After completing two years of college at Oregon State College now University, I applied for flight training with the army air corps. My goal was to fly P51 Mustangs. Within two weeks I was sent to Santa Ana for four weeks of basic training. The wash-out rate was high but I made it and was assigned to Thunderbird Field, Glendale AZ for Primary Flight Training. In those days flight training consisted of three parts; Primary, Basic and Advanced. We flew Stearmans, the biplane that is still popular today. This is where I first met Roy June who was a classmate all the way through graduation and commissioning. [See Roy June’s story on this Website] One third of us washed out in primary but both Roy and I made it through. I soloed in 14 hours.

Upon completion of Primary, I was sent to Minter Field near Bakersfield to fly the Vultee BT-13 which resembles the AT6 but otherwise is not much of an aircraft. We learned formation flying, navigation and night flying in the “Vultee Vibrator.” Sixty-five percent of our class washed out in Basic after the nine weeks of training.

Reaching our last training level, Advanced, was at Luke Field, Arizona. We now flew one of my favorite planes, the AT6 Texan also known as the Navy SNJ and Harvard in Canada and other Commonwealth countries. Each instructor had four cadets and we almost never flew unless all four of us were in formation. At this level, no one washed out and we, including Roy June, graduated Feb 8, 1944 class 44B receiving our wings. I was a 19 year old second lieutenant and single engine pilot. Life could not be better. I had won my life-long dream but my training was not over.

I was interested in night fighters and therefore began training in multi-engine airplanes starting with B25 bomber flights at Mather Field near Sacramento. During that three month training on a night flight over Hollywood/Van Nuys, we lost both engines and crash landed in an orange grove. Fortunately we were not serious injured but made the local papers. Night training then took me to Salinas where I flew A20s and finally to Van Nuys where I was introduced to the Lockheed P38. My career departed from night flying but World War 2 introduced me to the finest fighter of the war. Before my permanent assignment, I had accumulated 135 flight hours in the Lightening P38 and a total flight time of 800 hours.

I can’t say I was excited about my assignment to the 11th Fighter Squadron on Adak in the Aleutian Islands. Weather is almost always overcast, cold and raining. It is bad enough living in it but flying in it brings a whole new level of challenges. On the plus side, I got my pick of a brand new “out of the box” P38-L5 equipped with new stuff I didn’t even know how to use. Shortly after arrival, we were pushed further down the island chain to Shemya Island the second from the last island. This was necessary to put us as close to our target as possible, northern Japan.

With a range of 2200 miles, our P38s were within easy reach of the Kurile Islands 800 miles from Shemya. During those raids, we were never confronted by the Zero. They were afraid of us. When our bombers raided; however, the Zero’s attacked them unmercifully.

After the end of the war, I re-entered college and received my degree and back upon active duty, I served as a flight instructor in the T33 and later, the F86 during the Korean War. After Korea, I left fighters and joined the Strategic Air Command flying B47 bombers. I was ultimately assigned to Dow AFB, Bangor, Maine during the cold war flying B52Gs. Those were long missions to the Middle East and back over Spain. We carried defensive weapons and nukes. When I retired, Nov. 1, 1970 as a Lt. Colonel, I was the last fighter pilot in SAC and also the most senior pilot in SAC. I returned to my second love, teaching in Klammath Falls, Oregon. I like to quote Jimmy Doolittle, “I could never be that lucky again.”

Source Document

Enjoy your time with family and friends, take care, fly safe, and join me next week when we will talk about ?????.

Robert Novell

April 17, 2026

The Honolulu Clipper – April 10, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:54:00 +0000

RN3DB

April 10, 2026

Good Morning and Welcome Back,

This week I will be talking about my favorite airline – Pan Am. I have written a number of articles on Pan Am as well as provided a few contradictions to some of their claims; however, they are still my favorite. Pan Am provided a solid footing for commercial aviation in the US, and of course they brought us the giant Clippers that tamed the oceans of the world.

This week I want to talk about the Honolulu Clipper but before I do I want to give you a few blog articles to review if you need to refresh your memory on some of the specifics of Pan Am.

There are many more articles on the blog, including the story of the Clipper stranded in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor was attacked, but today I want to talk about a Clipper that was buried at sea.

The Honolulu Clipper

The Honolulu Clipper departed Hawaii on 3 November 1945 carrying 26 military personnel returning to the United States after service in the Pacific. The aircraft lost power in both starboard engines after five hours of flying, and successfully landed 650 miles east of Oahu shortly before midnight. The merchant tanker Englewood Hills maintained radio contact, found the aircraft and removed the passengers on the morning of 4 November.

The escort carrier Manila Bay arrived and sent over aircraft mechanics who were unable to repair the engines at sea. Manila Bay then attempted to tow the aircraft, but the tow line parted as weather deteriorated. The seaplane tender San Pablo was assigned to tow the flying boat into port, but the Honolulu Clipper was damaged in a collision with the tender on 7 November and intentionally sunk on 14 November by perforating the hull with 1200 20mm shells after salvage was deemed impractical.

A sad ending but wait……….There is a effort underway to recover her from the 17,000 foot deep watery grave, and for that story, as well as more pictures and a detailed account of her fate, please click on the following link………………….. The Honolulu Clipper’s Last Flight

Now, for those of you who have never seen the video “The Long Way Home – The Flight of the Pacific Clipper” I have the video below.

I hope everyone had a good week and will have an even better weekend. Take care, fly safe, and keep friends and family close.

Robert Novell
APRIL 10, 2026

The Seaplane Designed to Deliver a Nuclear Payload – April 3, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:27:00 +0000

RN3DB

April 3, 2026

Good Morning,

This week I want to take you back to a time when nuclear capability was the focus of the United Sates and all proposals from the US Navy, Air Force, and other branches were taken seriously by the politicians. One of those proposals, the P6M SeaMaster proposed by the Navy, offered the US greater flexibility and higher speeds than that of the B-47, or B-52, which was being used by the Strategic Air Command; however, the SeaMaster never went in to production as a result of the U.S. changing focus and moving ahead with the development of the Polaris Submarine and the ICBMs being put in place by the Air Force.

Enjoy this look back, and the videos, at a time in our history when our country believed that a nuclear confrontation with Russia was unavoidable…..

Martin P6M SeaMaster

In the 1950s, the U. S. Navy saw itself being left out of all-important strategic bombing duties while the Air Force seemingly monopolized the mission with 2,000 long-range bombers ready to attack the Soviet Union. The Navy worked hard to develop a strategic nuclear role by positioning larger aircraft aboard its aircraft carriers, but such carrier-based aircraft were never competitive with the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command. The solution for the Navy, at least as some planners saw it, was to use large seaplanes for strategic missions, freeing the crews from dependence on easily targeted airfields with fixed runways.

The term Seaplane Striking Force (SSF) came into use in the Pentagon. And the most ambitious seaplane ever planned in the United States came into being – the Martin P6M SeaMaster, a graceful, four-jet flying boat almost the size of a B-52 Stratofortress. When details of the SeaMasters’ design were disclosed – some, with Navy cooperation, appearing for the first time in Roy Crane’s syndicated Buz Sawyer comic strip – one observer called the SeaMaster “elegant.” Even today, looking back, it is difficult not to be impressed with the beauty and functionality of this large, highly original aircraft.

Strategic Ambitions

The Navy and the Glenn L. Martin Company envisioned a striking force of P6M SeaMaster seaplanes carrying out nuclear bombing missions and pioneering atomic energy as a source of power for aircraft. Martin built nine P6M SeaMasters. The enthusiasm over their graceful appearance was well founded, but their story turned out to embody tragic elements.

Design work on the SeaMaster began when the Navy laid down a 1953 requirement for a high performance, multirole flying boat. Known to the manufacturer as the Martin Model 275, the design that emerged had an all-metal hull of high length/beam ratio, mounting a high-set wing, sharply swept at 40 degrees, which incorporated so much anhedral (or negative dihedral) that the stabilizing floats on the wingtips were attached permanently.

The P6M-1 SeaMaster had a T-tail. Mounted above the wing to minimize spray ingestion were four 13,000-pound thrust Allison J71 turbojet engines with afterburners. The pressurized flight compartment had provision for a crew of five.

Built by Martin (a predecessor of today’s Lockheed Martin) in Baltimore and tested in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the first XP6M-1 made its maiden flight on July 14, 1955. It was one of the last Navy planes to be painted in the familiar blue color scheme before the service changed, that year, to a gray and white color combination.

On Dec. 7, 1955, two days after the death of aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin, 69, who had created the great company bearing his name, the no. 1 SeaMaster broke up, exploded, and burned on a flight over the Chesapeake. Four men died, including Lt. Cmdr. Victor Utgoff, 40, one of the Navy’s most experienced seaplane pilots.

The second SeaMaster flew on May 18, 1956. The Navy placed an order for six J71-powered pre-production XP6M-1 flying boats. On the basis of early flight tests, the Navy placed a subsequent order for 24 production P6M-2 aircraft, which differed in being powered by 17,000-pound non-afterburning Pratt & Whitney J75-P-2-PW turbojet engines and fixed some of the faults found in the XP6M-1.

The SeaMasters’ ordnance delivery system was a Martin trademark, a variation of a feature found on the company’s XB-51 and B-57 bombers. This was a rotary weapons door in the hull, on a fore and aft axis, that could dispense bombs or aerial mines at speeds up to 600 mph. The ordnance could be replenished from openings on top of the hull. Pneumatic tubes sealed the opening around the hull weapons door. The weapons door rotated 180 degrees, allowing weapons to be dropped while keeping the hull sealed to prevent buffeting produced by old-fashioned bomb bay doors.

It was expected that the SeaMaster could, if necessary, be fueled from a submarine near enemy shores – an interesting precedent for the emphasis on littoral warfare adopted by the Navy in later years. The jet flying boat would then have a combat radius of up to 3,000 miles. An imaginative map drawn up in the Pentagon showed offshore SeaMasters capable of flying far enough to strike virtually every important target in the U.S.S.R – wishful thinking which ignored the risks of launching missions near an enemy’s coast.

Flight Tests

The second SeaMaster crashed on Nov. 9, 1957. The four-man crew bailed out successfully and although two SeaMasters had been lost in test-flying mishaps, no serious flaws were ever found in the flying boat’s design. It was immensely strong, with the aluminum skinning at the wing roots an inch thick, and very fast, demonstrating .89 Mach at low level when the contemporary B-52 could achieve only .55 Mach.

But the Navy wasn’t really prepared to build the infrastructure it would need for a global, water-based bomber force. The Navy had no air refueling tankers, no submarines capable of refueling the SeaMaster far from home, and no handy way to cope with mechanical breakdowns in an aircraft sent afar on a solo assignment.

After three XP6M-1 and three P6M-2 aircraft had been built, contracts for remaining airframes were cancelled on Aug. 21, 1959, in a decision that was and remains controversial.

The SeaMaster weighed 160,000 pounds on takeoff, and was 134 feet long, with a wingspan of 102 feet.

Unfortunately, the SeaMaster initially “had design flaws and under performing engines,” said Stan Piet of the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum in Baltimore. Both prototypes “were lost tragically in crashes that didn’t need to happen,” Piet said. Piet said that the SeaMaster “became a viable airplane by 1959, but by then they didn’t need it because they had Polaris.” While the flaws in the SeaMaster had been worked out, the Navy concluded that the concept itself was flawed, because other alternatives for the nuclear strike mission were being developed.

The Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) gave the Navy a strategic nuclear mission never really achieved by carrier-based or water-borne airplanes. All of the SeaMasters were eventually scrapped, with not a single example preserved for history. The SeaMasters were the fastest flying boats ever constructed, but sadly the last aircraft that the Glenn L. Martin corporation ever built.

Source Document

Have a good weekend, enjoy time with family and friends, and remember that someday, in the final moments of life on this plane of existence where we live, your life will flash before your eyes – make sure that the life you see in this video is worth watching.

Robert Novell

April 3, 2026

The Goose – Why Did Howard Hughes Keep the Goose? – March 27, 2026

Robert Fulmer — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:40:00 +0000

RN3DB

March 27, 2026

Good Morning,

This week we continue our story on the Goose but before I do I have a few corrections/additions that I need to share with you which were provided by Stewart Bailey, who is the curator at the Evergreen Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

First – Reference the Duramold, there were layers “as thin as” 1/32 inch; however, many layers were thicker in areas like the wing spar and keel.

Second – The Goose did not have a ramp from the hangar to the water. There was no beaching gear, and indeed the size of the airplane made the concept of external gear impractical. So, where the Goose was hangared was really a dry dock, and actually the hangar had three areas that met that criteria. One for the hull, and two for the outrigger floats. When they moved the completed aircraft out of the hangar for it’s first/last flight they flooded the drydocks and floated the Goose out into the open water.

Why Did Howard Hughes

Keep and Protect the Goose

We all know, from articles of the time, that Hughes believed his accomplishment with bringing the Goose alive was something no one else could have possibly accomplished, and he was right; however, why did Hughes’ spend a million plus dollars a year in the 50s/60s/70s to protect the Goose? Why did he keep a staff of 350 employees working on, and modifying, the Goose for the next flight which never came? Was it his larger than life ego or was there something else?

Once the plane had safely landed engineers, scientists, military officials and air industry executives all flocked to examine it to see what lessons they could learn. Its vast size was something that particularly intrigued the major airlines. The design information they gleaned from the plane’s construction greatly helped in the manufacture of new kinds of aircraft, leading eventually to the Jumbo Jets of today.

Similarly, the plane’s technology was of especial interest to the military. In fact, from this date forward Hughes would began to withdraw from public life and concentrate more on air defense technology, which made the US Air Force one of his major clients. This diversification of Hughes Industries, which had started out as the manufacturer of oil-drilling bits, directly grew out of the work that went into the Spruce Goose.

By the early 1950s as the Cold War got under way, Hughes was working closely with the US Air Force and the Department of Defense in developing aircraft weapons technology. Aware of Hughes’ erratic behavior, his governmental business partners watched him closely. An FBI report of 1953 shows just how far Hughes’ mental state had declined in six short years, describing him as ‘a paranoid, vengeful, and emotionally disturbed man, whose mind has deteriorated to the point that he is capable of both suicide and murder’.

Hughes’ love of flying had ultimately led him into a world of politics, and state security, that fueled his megalomania and growing sense of paranoia, and perhaps hastening his end. By his death in 1976 Hughes’ life had encompassed both the glamor and the tragedy of the ‘American Dream’, and, in fact, had done much to invent it.

Source Document

The amount of information that is available on the hidden years is limited; however, once again Stewart Bailey, at the Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, was kind enough to provide a few additional details. Below is his email:

**********

Bob-

The best material I have seen on the “hidden” years of the Spruce Goose is in Charles Barton’s Book; “Howard Hughes and His Flying Boat.” In the book, he talked with a number of Hughes associates who told him about what went on during the years that it was stored.

Hughes made many changes to the aircraft both internal and external, after the one and only flight. One of the most noticeable on the outside is the addition of two rows of stiffeners bolted to the outside on each side of the tail, where the tail cone attaches to the rest of the fuselage. The story is that during the flight, there was a lot of flexing of the tail which caused Hughes a great deal of anxiety. The stiffeners were an attempt to strengthen that area, which was an acknowledged “weak spot” on the aircraft. Internally, Hughes made a number of changes including a fire suppression system, the addition of a “swamp cooler” and the spiral stair case that goes up to the flight deck. (The original access was via a simple ladder.)

On the flight deck itself he re-arranged the controls to make it more user friendly, which included modifying the control panel to wrap around the pilot’s position where he had more access to various switches. Prior to that, he had had to ask the engineers seated behind him at the Engineering station to perform certain tasks rather than do them himself. He also modified the throttle arrangement. Originally he only had four throttles; one to regulate two engines at a time. He modified it to eight throttles, allowing him to control each engine individually.

In one of the more bizarre incidents of it life in captivity, the Spruce Goose was damaged by a flooding incident in September, 1953. So much oil had been pumped out of the ground on Terminal Island, where the plane was hangared, that the island actually sank. This, tied in with an unusually high tide caused the aircraft to float up until the tip of the tail smashed into the roof of the hangar. The top of the vertical tail was repaired and the hangar cleaned after the flood, but the airplane today still bears scars from that incident, which were discovered during the cleaning and restoration process back in the 1990s. After the flood, the hangar building was also enlarged to keep the airplane from ever again bumping the ceiling.

All the best,

Stewart

Stewart W. Bailey-Curator

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

500 NE Captain Michael King Smith Way

McMinnville, OR 97128

www.evergreenmuseum.org

**********

That’s it for the this week and I want to again thank Stewart Bailey for his contributions to my effort to tell a story about the Goose that is hopefully more telling than what you may find on the web. Have a good weekend, keep friends and family close, and remember all Aviators are “Gatekeepers of the Third Dimension.”

Robert Novell

March 27, 2026

Howard Hughes, Henry Kaiser, and The Goose- March 20, 2026

Robert Fulmer — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:56:00 +0000

RN3DB

March 20, 2026

Good Morning,

Welcome back to the 3DB and this week I want to revisit the blog I posted after visiting the Evergreen Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. The Goose, and Howard Hughes, are iconic figures in aviation history and I especially enjoy the research I have done on Howard Hughes whose lifetime is not as straight forward as people have been led to believe.

So, with that having been said, lets talk about the Goose………………………………

The HK-1 Hercules

(Spruce Goose)

The Goose was not the brainchild of Howard Hughes. The man who put the concept of the Goose on the table was Henry Kaiser – the man who made the “Liberty Ships” for the war effort. (I will have a few statistics on Liberty Ships and a video at the conclusion of this article.)

Now it may seem a little strange that a ship builder suddenly wanted to build airplanes but this was not his plan. Henry Kaiser was going to have Howard Hughes build his brainchild. Now, you know why the original designation of the Goose was HK-1. H is for Hughes and K is for Kaiser; however, the final designation of the Goose was H-4 after Kaiser pulled out of the project and Hughes put his reputation, and money, on the line to prove his critics wrong.

Now, why did Uncle Sam need the Goose…………

The geographic isolation of the US was an advantage, reference keeping the war off our shores, during the Second World War, but this also led to logistic problems with ferrying men and machines to war theaters. Henry Kaiser, a civil engineer who had a habit of thinking big, was building Liberty Ships and had an idea for a large flying boat, which would avoid the U-boat menace in the North Atlantic. He approached Howard Hughes to build the huge craft, which would be called the HK-1.

The HK-1 contract was issued in 1942, as a development contract, and called for three aircraft to be constructed under a two-year deadline to be available for the war effort. The HK-1 was to have eight Pratt & Whitney 3 000 HP engines, a wingspan of 320 feet and a length of 218 feet. It was designed to be capable of carrying 750 fully equipped troops or two 30 ton Sherman tanks. Its fully loaded cargo capacity was 150,000 pounds and all cargo would be loaded through front doors.

The HK-1 would be built from wood, because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, and the HK-1 critics nicknamed it the “Spruce Goose” despite it being made almost entirely of birch rather than spruce. The plane was covered with duramold, which involved laminating and molding thin sheets of veneer together and one of the most amazing aspects of the construction was that the Spruce Goose had almost no nails or screws. The duramold process used layers of 1/32 inch wood veneer laid in alternating grain direction and then bonded with glue and steam-shaped. Duramold made the Goose both strong, and lightweight, for its size.

As we know the airplane suffered extensive delays. Part of the time delay was due to Hughes insistence on perfection; however, the technological problems that had to be overcome in the design were numerous and included the testing of new concepts for the large hull, flying control surfaces, and the incorporation of power boost systems for control.

Henry Kaiser pulled out of the program because of the delays and Hughes continued the program alone and redesignated the HK-1 the “H-4 Hercules.” Hughes signed a new contract with Uncle Sam, which now limited production to one prototype. Work proceeded slowly, with the result that the H-4 was not completed until well after the war was over.

The airplane was shipped over the roads/highways to Pier E in Long Beach, California by a company specializing in house moving. It was moved in three large sections consisting of the fuselage and each wing, and a fourth smaller shipment containing the tail assembly parts and other smaller assemblies. After final assembly, a hangar was erected around the flying boat with a ramp to launch the H-4 into the harbor. It has been said that this new hangar was the first climate-controlled building in the United States. Imagine that………………

Now that we have an overview of the project let’s talk about one of the few men Howard Hughes trusted and why the history books are wrong about who conceived the idea of the HK-1.

Glenn Odekirk

(The Man Who Built the Spruce Goose for Howard Hughes)

Glenn Odekirk, whose life and times were indelibly entwined with Howard Hughes and who designed and built the Spruce Goose, the flying boat that became more of a success on the ground than it ever was in the air, has died.

Odekirk was 81 when he died of cancer late Monday at a hospice in Las Vegas.

Over the years Odekirk, who met Hughes on a movie set nearly 60 years ago, was the eccentric billionaire’s “shop superintendent,” “chief mechanic” and “assistant to the president” at Hughes Aircraft Co.

What he always was in fact was one of the few people Hughes ever trusted to design the planes that the young adventurer flew to the then furthermost fringes of possibility. He was involved on two important events, when the industrialist, and flier, made an unsuccessful world record airspeed run in 1935 and a nonstop West Coast to East Coast flight in 1938.

However, Odekirk’s most lasting legacy will probably be the mammoth wooden Spruce Goose seaplane with the 100-yard wingspan that has become its own museum in Long Beach Harbor, next to another memento of a Gargantuan past, the Queen Mary.

In a 1979 interview with The Times, Odekirk said he conceived of the flying boat when he heard shipbuilder Henry Kaiser complain on the radio about the huge number of vessels being lost to German submarines in World War II.

“‘Well, I guess I’ll have to put wings on my boat,’ ” Odekirk recalled Kaiser saying.

Odekirk approached Kaiser on behalf of Hughes and together the three men conceived the HK-1 (for Hughes and Kaiser), known popularly as the Spruce Goose, even though a preponderance of the wood used was birch. Odekirk was the designer in charge of the flying boat that was to carry 750 fully equipped troops across the Atlantic to fight in Europe.

However, the plane, 218 feet long and 79 feet high, made only one brief flight. That was on Nov. 2, 1947, 70 feet above the water with Hughes at the controls. It was then placed in storage until converted to a popular public attraction a few years ago.

Shortly after that, Odekirk left Hughes to start his own company and the two men saw each other infrequently, if at all, until Hughes’ death in 1976.

Odekirk contended over the years that the old flying boat, with some mechanical adjustments and checks, could be flown again.

“To me it would be (as simple as) ABC,” Odekirk said.

Source Document

OK, so now we know the rest of the story about the concept, and design, and the man/men responsible for bringing the Goose to life. So, let’s talk about what happened after that historic flight we are all familiar with.

What happened to the Goose after the first/last flight is a story all to itself. The number of people involved maintaining the airplane, the modifications that Hughes ordered performed, and his constant expectations that he was going to fly the airplane again will be covered in pat three of the series. Stand-by for the rest of the story.

I hope you have enjoyed part one on the Goose but before I wrap it up I wanted to give you a brief overview on “Liberty Ships” which will help everyone better understand why Uncle Sam was looking for a boat with wings.

The Liberty Ship Program

The origins of the Liberty Ship can be traced to a design proposed by the British in 1940. Seeking to replace wartime losses, the British placed contracts with US shipyards for 60 steamers of the Ocean class. These steamers were of a simple design and featured a single coal-fired 2,500 horsepower reciprocating steam engine. While the coal-fired reciprocating steam engine was obsolete, it was reliable and Britain possessed a large supply of coal. While the British ships were being constructed, the US Maritime Commission examined the design and made alterations to lessen coast and speed construction.

This revised design was classified EC2-S-C1 and featured oil-fired boilers. The most significant change was to replace much of the riveting with welded seams. A new practice, the use of welding decreased labor costs and required fewer skilled workers. Due to their plain looks, the Liberty Ships initially had a poor public image. To combat this, the Maritime Commission dubbed September 27, 1941, as “Liberty Fleet Day” and launched the first 14 vessels. In his speech at the launch ceremony, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt cited Patrick Henry’s famed speech and stated that the ships would bring liberty to Europe.

In early 1941, the US Maritime Commission placed an order for 260 ships of the Liberty design. Of these, 60 were for Britain. With the implementation of the Lend-Lease Program in March, orders more than doubled. To meet the demands of this construction program, new yards were established on both coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next four years, US shipyards would produce 2,751 Liberty Ships. The majority (1,552) of these came from new yards built on the West Coast and operated by Henry J. Kaiser. Best known for building the Bay Bridge and the Hoover Dam, Kaiser pioneered new shipbuilding techniques.

Operating four yards in Richmond, CA and three in the Northwest, Kaiser developed methods for prefabricating and mass-producing Liberty Ships. Components were built all across the US and transported to shipyards where the vessels could be assembled in record time. During the war, a Liberty Ship could be built in a about two weeks at a Kaiser yard. In November 1942, one of Kaiser’s Richmond yards built a Liberty Ship (Robert E. Peary) in 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes as a publicity stunt. Nationally, the average construction time was 42 days and by 1943, three Liberty Ships were being completed each day.

The speed at which Liberty Ships could be constructed allowed the US to build cargo vessels faster than German U-boats could sink them. This, along with Allied military successes against the U-boats, ensured that Britain and Allied forces in Europe remained well supplied during World War II. Liberty Ships served in all theaters with distinction. Throughout the war, Liberty Ships were manned members of the US Merchant Marine, with gun crews provided by the US Naval Armed Guard. Among the notable achievements of the Liberty Ships was SS Stephen Hopkins sinking the German raider Stier on September 27, 1942.

Initially designed to last five years, many Liberty Ships continued to ply the seaways into the 1970s; in addition, many of the shipbuilding techniques employed in the Liberty program became standard practice across the industry and are still in use today. While not glamorous, the Liberty Ship proved vital to the Allied war effort. The ability to build merchant shipping at a rate faster than it was lost, while maintaining a steady stream of supplies to the front was one of the keys to winning the war.

Source Document

While it can be agreed that the number of large transport airplanes, like the Goose, produced would never rival the number of “Liberty Ships”, I think it is easy for everyone to see that the concept of the Goose was the building block for what we refer to today as an “Air Bridge.” The “Air Bridge” concept was used effectively in Iraq, and Afghanistan, by the US military to support ground operations using the C-5, which looks like the Goose by the way, and the C-17.

Have a good weekend, stay close to family and friends, and remember all aviators/aviation enthusiast are “Gatekeepers of the Third Dimension.”

Robert Novell

March 20, 2026

Did You Know? – March 13, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:44:00 +0000

RN3DB

March 13, 2026

Good Morning and Happy Friday,

This week I want to share with you an email that I received from a friend. I think you will find this personal account very interesting and well worth keeping for a reference.

Enjoy………………………………

INTERESTING EARLY AMERICAN

AVIATION HISTORY

How many of you know that in 1910, mighty Martin Marietta got its start in an abandoned California church? That’s where Glenn L. Martin with his amazing mother Minta Martin, and their mechanic Roy Beal, constructed a fragile biplane that Glenn used to teach himself to fly.

It has often been told how Douglas Aircraft started operations in 1920 in a barbershop’s backroom on L.A.’s Pico Boulevard. Interestingly, the barber-shop is still operating.

The Lockheed Company built the first of their famous Vegas’ in 1927 inside a building currently used by Victory Cleaners at 1040 Sycamore in Hollywood.

In 1922, Claude Ryan, a 24 year old military reserve pilot, was getting his hair cut in San Diego when the barber mentioned that the ‘town’s aviator’ was in jail for smuggling Chinese illegal’s up from Mexico. Claude found out that if he replaced the pilot ‘sitting in the pokey,’ that he would be able to lease the town’s airfield for $50 a month – but he also had to agree to fly North and East – not South!

Northrop’s original location was an obscure Southern California hotel. It was available because the police had raided the hotel and found that its steady residents were money-minded gals entertaining transit male hotel guests.

Glenn Martin built his first airplane in a vacant church before he moved to a vacant apricot cannery in Santa Ana. He was a showman and he traveled the county fair, and air meet circuit, as an exhibitionist aviator. From his exhibition proceeds Glenn was able to pay his factory workers and purchase the necessary wood, linen, and wire.

His mother, Minta, and two men ran the factory while Glenn risked his neck and gadded about the country. One of his workers was 22-year old Donald Douglas, who was the entire engineering department. A Santa Monica youngster named Larry Bell, later founded Bell Aircraft which today is Bell Helicopter Textron, ran the shop.

Another part of Glenn Martin’s business was a flying school with several planes based at Griffith Park, and a seaplane operation on the edge of Watts where his instructors taught a rich young man named Bill Boeing to fly.

Later, Boeing bought one of Glenn Martin’s seaplanes and had it shipped back to his home in Seattle. At this same time, Bill Boeing hired away Glenn’s personal mechanic. Later, after Boeing’s seaplane crashed in Puget Sound, he placed an order to Martin for replacement parts.

Still chafing from having his best mechanic ‘swiped,’ a trick he later often used himself, Martin decided to take his sweet time and allowed Bill Boeing to ‘stew’ for a while. Bill Boeing wasn’t known to be a patient man, so he began fabricating his own aircraft parts, an activity that morphed into constructing entire airplanes and eventually the Boeing Company we know today.

A former small shipyard nicknamed ‘Red Barn’ became Boeing Aircraft’s first home. Soon, a couple of airplanes were being built inside, each of them having a remarkable resemblance to Glenn Martin’s airplanes that, interestingly had its own remarkable resemblance to Glenn Curtiss’ airplanes.

A few years later, when the Great depression intervened and Boeing couldn’t sell enough airplanes to pay his bills, he diversified into custom built speed boats and furniture for his wealthy friends.

After WWI, a bunch of sharpies from Wall Street gained control of the Wright Brothers Co in Dayton and the Martin Company in L.A. and ‘stuck them’ together as the Wright-Martin Company.

Wright-Martin began building an obsolete biplane design with a foreign Hispano-Suiza engine. Angered because he had been out maneuvered with a bad idea, Martin walked out taking Larry Bell and other key employees with him.

From the deep wallet of a wealthy baseball mogul, Martin was able to establish a new factory. Then his good luck continued, when the future aviation legend Donald Douglas, was persuaded by Glenn to join his team. The Martin MB-1 quickly emerged from the team’s efforts and became the Martin Bomber.

Although too late to enter WWI, the Martin Bomber showed its superiority when Billy Mitchell used it to sink several captured German battleships and cruisers to prove its worth. He was later court martialed for his effort.

In Cleveland, a young fellow called ‘Dutch’ Kindelberger joined Martin as an engineer. Later, as the leader of North American Aviation, Dutch became justifiably well-known.

Flashing back to 1920, Donald Douglas had saved $60,000, returned to L.A. and rented a barbershop’s rear room and loft space in a carpenter’s shop nearby. There he constructed a classic passenger airplane called the Douglas Cloudster.

A couple of years later, Claude Ryan bought the Cloudster and used it to make daily flights between San Diego and Los Angeles. This gave Ryan the distinction of being the first owner/operator of Douglas transports. Claude Ryan later custom built Charles Lindbergh’s ‘ride’ to fame in the flying fuel tank christened: The Spirit of St. Louis.

In 1922, Donald Douglas won a contract from the Navy to build several torpedo carrying aircraft. While driving through Santa Monica’s wilderness, Douglas noticed an abandoned, barn-like movie studio. He stopped his roadster and prowled around. That abandoned studio became Douglas Aircraft’s first real factory.

With the $120,000 contract in his hand, Donald Douglas could afford to hire one or two more engineers. My brother, Gordon Scott, had been schooled in the little known science of aviation at England’s Fairey Aviation, so he hired Gordon.

My first association with the early aviation pioneers occurred when I paid my brother a visit at his new work place. Gordon was outside on a ladder washing windows. He was the youngest engineer. Windows were dirty. And Douglas Aircraft Company had no money to pay janitors.

Gordon introduced me to a towhead guy called Jack Northrop, and another chap named Jerry Vultee. Jack Northrop had moved over from Lockheed Aircraft. And all of them worked together on the Douglas Aircraft’s world cruiser designs.

While working in his home after work and on weekends, Jack designed a wonderfully advanced streamlined airplane. When Allan Loughead [Lockheed] found a wealthy investor willing to finance Northrop’s new airplane, he linked up with Allan and together, they leased a Hollywood workshop where they constructed the Lockheed Vega. It turned out to be sensational with its clean lines and high performance. Soon Amelia Earhart and others flew the Vega and broke many of aviation’s world records.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending time with Ed Heinemann who later designed the AD, A3D and A4D. He told me how my Dad would fly out to Palmdale with an experimental aircraft they were both working on. They would take it for a few hops and come up with some fixes. After having airframe changes fabricated in a nearby machine shop, they would hop it again to see if they had gotten the desired results. If it worked out, Mr. Heinemann would incorporate the changes on the aircraft’s assembly line. No money swapped hands!

In May 1927, Lindbergh flew to Paris and triggered a bedlam where everyone was trying to fly everywhere. Before the first Lockheed Vega was built, William Randolph Hearst had already paid for it and had it entered in an air race from the California Coast to Honolulu.

In June 1927, my brother, Gordon, left Douglas Aircraft to become Jack Northrop’s assistant at Lockheed. While there, he managed to get himself hired as the navigator on Hearst’s Vega. The race was a disaster and ten lives were lost. The Vega and my brother vanished. A black cloud hung heavily over the little shop. However, Hubert Wilkins, later to become Sir Hubert Wilkins, took Vega #2 and made a successful polar flight from Alaska to Norway. A string of successful flights after that placed Lockheed in aviation’s forefront.

I went to work for Lockheed as it 26th employee, shortly after the disaster, and I worked on the Vega. It was made almost entirely of wood and I quickly become a half-assed carpenter.

At this time, General Motors had acquired North American consisting of Fokker Aircraft, Pitcairn Aviation [later Eastern Airlines] and Sperry Gyroscope and hired Dutch Kindelberger away from Douglas to run it. Dutch moved the entire operation to L.A. where Dutch and his engineers came up with the P-51 Mustang.

Interestingly, just a handful of young men played roles affecting the lives of all Americans….. as it initiated the Southern California metamorphosis, from a semi-desert with orange groves and celluloid, into a dynamic complex, supporting millions.

Although this technological explosion had startling humble beginnings, taking root as acorns in – a barber shop’s back room – a vacant church – and an abandoned cannery – but came to fruit on as mighty oaks.

(Source: Denham S. Scott, North American Aviation Retirees’ Bulletin)

I hope you enjoyed the look back at aviation history in the US as much as I did. Have a good weekend, be safe, and stop by again next week when we will talk about……………..

Robert Novell

March 13, 2026

Washington State Apples – Japan and “Upside Down Pangborn” – March 6, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:37:00 +0000

RN3DB

March 6, 2026

Good Morning,

Welcome back to the 3DB. This week I want to talk about a man who flew the Pacific nonstop but did so with a few not so normal modifications to his airplane. The history of this gentleman was told to me by a friend in Oregon who has visited the small museum, commemorating the crossing of Mr. Clyde “Upside Down” Pangborn and his copilot, and I think you will find the story interesting and unique.

First, however, let’s talk a about how Washington Apples became a mainstay in Japan…………

Washington Apples and Japan

The most lasting memory of this flight was a gift from Clyde Pangborn to the people of Misawa City, Japan. Remembering the touching gift of five apples from the little Japanese boy on Sabishiro Beach prior to his departure on his historic flight, Pangborn arranged for the mayor of Wenatchee, Washington to send to his counterpart in Misawa City five cuttings from Washington State’s famed Richard Delicious apples.

The cuttings were grafted onto trees in Misawa City and within a few years, cuttings and seedlings were distributed to apple growers around the country. Today, Richard Delicious apples are grown throughout Japan and now you know the rest of the story.

Who is “Upside Down Pangborn?”…….

Upside Down Pangborn

Clyde Edward “Upside Down” Pangborn was born in Bridgeport, Washington, on October 28th, 1894, and after finishing high school, Pangborn attended the University of Idaho for two and a half years, where he studied civil engineering. In 1917, Pangborn answered a call for volunteers and enlisted in the Aviation Section of the United States Army Signal Corps as a cadet and learned to fly. After working temporarily as a flight instructor on Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, aircraft at Ellington Field in Houston, Texas, he was demobilized in March of 1919.

Pangborn, still interested in an aviation career, decided to pursue professional barnstorming. He began to make his living doing exhibition flying and aerial acrobatics at fairs, dedications, and other public events throughout the West Coast region. He was known as “Upside-Down Pangborn” because of his penchant for slow-rolling planes onto their backs and gliding upside-down. In 1921, Pangborn and partner Ivan R. Gates formed the famous Gates Flying Circus, which performed both throughout the country as well as internationally.

The show was very popular and between 1922 and 1928 Pangborn performed successfully without an accident/incident or personal injury and established the world record for changing planes in mid-air. During this period Pangborn had the good fortune to meet pilot Hugh Herndon, Jr., who would later accompany Pangborn on their famous transpacific flight.

For a complete profile on the man called “Upside Down” visit the National Aviation Hall of Fame where he was enshrined in 1995.

Now, let’s talk about the nonstop flight from Tokyo……………

Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr.

(First to Fly Nonstop Across the Pacific)

Clyde ‘Upside-Down Pangborn and his co-pilot Hugh Herndon, Jr., were under house arrest in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. Charged with espionage and making an illegal flight, they had been detained for seven weeks since landing in Tokyo on August 8, 1931. The two American airmen had strutted onto aviation’s world stage 12 days earlier. They had taken off from New York’s Roosevelt Field in a blaze of publicity, with high hopes of beating the around-the-world speed record set by one-eyed Wiley Post and his Australian navigator Harold Gatty.

Pangborn, a daredevil stunt pilot, was well-known in American aviation circles. He had been chief pilot and half owner of the fabled Gates Flying Circus until it closed down in 1928. His playboy co-pilot, an aviation novice, was better known in society circles. A Princeton dropout who loved the good life, Herndon was the son of Standard Oil heiress Alice Boardman. Anxious to see her son make a name for himself, the socialite had not turned a hair when he asked her for $100,000 to finance the flight.

Their hopes of beating Post and Gatty’s flight time had come to an end in Khabarovsk, Siberia, where, landing in a teeming rainstorm, their Bellanca Skyrocket Miss Veedol had slid off the runway and become hopelessly bogged down. Already well behind their strict schedule, and with no hope of taking off for several days, the despondent pair abandoned their world flight. They decided, instead, to salvage something from the trip by competing for a $50,000 prize offered by Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper for the first nonstop flight across the Pacific. They carried no maps of Japan, so Pangborn cabled the editor of the English-language Japanese Times, asking for a track and distance from Khabarovsk to Tokyo and requesting that the American Embassy obtain landing permission from the Japanese Aviation Bureau.

The field at Khabarovsk had dried out before their cable was answered, so Pangborn decided to take off before it was swamped again by threatening storms. Flying a rough heading for Japan, they received a radio message giving a track and distance and advising that landing approval was being sought. After landing at Haneda to get directions, they finally reached Tachikawa airport, where they were met by angry officials demanding to see their landing papers. Japan was at war with China and, understandably, did not take kindly to foreign pilots arriving unannounced and photographing military-restricted areas. Pangborn recounted: We were arraigned on three counts. That we had flown over fortified areas and that we had photographed these areas. True we didn’t have a flight permit with us, but we assumed it would be routine for our embassy to arrange it. As for flying over fortified areas and taking pictures, we were just tourists taking what we thought were pretty landscape shots.

Their seven weeks under house arrest gave Pangborn and Herndon the time to plan their transpacific attempt. They were also able to consider the efforts of the other teams, Japanese and American, that had already unsuccessfully competed for the Asahi Shimbun prize.

The Japanese decision to sponsor a Pacific flight had been sparked four years earlier by Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic triumph. Lindbergh’s New York to Paris solo flight had electrified the world. Overnight, the American had become an international hero–the most photographed person of his era. The Japanese believed that the first successful transpacific flight, which was a longer and more demanding undertaking than crossing the Atlantic, would help focus attention on Japan’s emergence as the industrial powerhouse of Asia–particularly if a Japanese pilot and plane were first across.

While the world still bathed in the afterglow of Lindbergh’s success, Japan announced its transpacific intentions. The Imperial Aeronautics Association declared that a Japanese pilot, flying in a Japanese-owned and -manufactured aircraft, would cross the Pacific. Shortly afterward, the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi Shimbun placed an order with T. Claude Ryan for an exact replica of Lindbergh’s long-range monoplane.

Delivered to Japan early in 1928, the Ryan NYP-2 (New York-Paris No. 2) was not purchased to attempt the Pacific flight. The original NYP had been built to Lindbergh’s specification to fly the 3,600 miles between New York and Paris–plus a few hundred extra for safety. The flight from Japan to America’s West Coast required an aircraft with a range of at least 4,500 miles.

Although the Japanese buyers may at first have thought it possible to extend the Ryan’s range, it seems more likely that the aircraft’s role was to act as a design guide for Japan’s Kawanishi Company to construct a similar but much larger, transpacific machine, designated the K-12 Nichi-Bei-Go). Two Ryans were ordered, one as a backup in case of an accident. The project folded, however, when flight testing proved that Kawanishi’s lumbering K-12 had neither the range nor the takeoff performance to make the transpacific flight. Red-faced Kawanishi officials hung one of the expensive white elephants from the factory ceiling beneath a banner proclaiming, How not to design or build a Special-Purpose Airplane.

Interest in the Asahi Shimbun prize did not diminish, even when Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew completed the first transpacific flight from Oakland, Calif., to Brisbane, Australia, in the Fokker F.VII/3m tri-motor Southern Cross in June 1928. The island-hopping flight, which did not qualify for the Japanese prize, was made in three stages; hence, it lacked the drama of a nonstop crossing.

The first nonstop Pacific attempt was made in 1930, when Canadian-born pilot Harold Bromley teamed up with Australian navigator Harold Gatty. Their aircraft was an elegant, 450-hp Wasp-powered monoplane manufactured by E.M. Smith and Company (Emsco) and named City of Tacoma–for the city that had sponsored the flight. Fully loaded, their Emsco had a still-air range of approximately 4,000 miles–500 miles less than they needed. To succeed they would require a tailwind. As this was more likely when flying east, the airmen decided to begin the flight from Japan. Taking off from a long, flat beach at Sabishiro, 370 miles north of Tokyo, they flew 1,250 miles, mostly in cloud, before headwinds forced them to turn back.

Daring young Japanese airman Seiji Yoshihara was the next to try. Yoshihara had made a sensational flight from Berlin to Tokyo in a tiny, open-cockpit Junkers A-50. He figured that the fuel economy of his airplane’s 85-hp engine would enable him to cross the Pacific. Equipping the Junkers with floats, Yoshihara took off on May 18, 1931, following the great circle route. He had covered almost 1,000 miles when the seaplane developed engine trouble, and he was forced to ditch in the Pacific. Miraculously, Yoshihara was picked up by a passing ship seven hours later.

Following Yoshihara’s gallant attempt, the Imperial Aeronautics Association announced additional prize money of $100,000 for a successful flight by a Japanese team. In the United States, a group of Seattle businessmen added a $28,000 sweetener to the $50,000 Asahi Shimbun prize. Their only stipulation was that the flight starts in Seattle and finish in Japan. This meant that prize money totaling $78,000 was now offered for non-Japanese teams–a fortune in those Depression days. It attracted Texan barnstormer Reginald Robbins and oilman Harold S. Jones, who had twice attempted a Seattle-Tokyo flight in their Lockheed Vega Fort Worth. Unfortunately, their shrewd plan to refuel from a Ford TriMotor tanker in the air over Alaska failed to work on both occasions. Another westbound attempt ended when a flier named Bob Wark was forced down near Vancouver, barely 100 miles from his starting point.

Following their aborted flight in 1930, Bromley and Gatty had left the Emsco in Japan to be sold. It was subsequently used in two further American transpacific attempts. The first ended when pilot Thomas Ash failed to get the Emsco off the sands at Sabishiro. For the second attempt, Los Angeles salesmen Cecil Allen and Don Moyle renamed the Emsco Clasina Madge. They took off from Sabishiro on September 8, 1931, while Pangborn and Herndon were still under house arrest in Tokyo. Long on courage but short on experience, Allen and Moyle got lost and, after flying aimlessly for more than a day, landed on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The pair eventually headed on toward the United States with stops in the Aleutians and Alaska. The Clasina Madge finally reached Tacoma on September 25, 1931.

Pangborn and Herndon already had been tried in Tokyo’s district court. Found guilty, they were sentenced to 205 days hard labor or fines of $1,050 each. After paying their fines, Pangborn and Herndon revealed their plan to attempt the Japan to United States flight. Because of the recent failures, Japan’s Civil Aviation Bureau had restricted future flights to only approved aircraft. After days of haggling, approval was reluctantly given for Pangborn to attempt one overloaded takeoff from Japan.

They flew Miss Veedol to Sabishiro Beach on September 29 and made final modifications for the flight. Pangborn had worked out a clever plan to reduce drag and extend the Bellanca’s range. The idea had previously been used in 1919 by Australian Harry Hawker in an unsuccessful attempt to cross the Atlantic. The scheme involved removing the bolts holding the landing gear to the fuselage and replacing them with a series of clips and springs attached to a cable. By pulling on the cable following takeoff, Pangborn would jettison the whole structure. For the landing he attached steel skids to the Bellanca’s potbelly.

Pangborn explained: We determined that to make the trans-Pacific flight we would have to take off with the heaviest wing loading [fuel load] we had ever attempted with the Bellanca. Even then it was marginal that we would have enough fuel to take us the 4,500 miles to the U.S. west coast even at the most economical cruising speed. Studying the problem I calculated that we could increase our speed [by] approximately 15 miles per hour if we could rid ourselves of the drag of the fixed landing gear. On a forty hour flight that would be the equivalent of adding 600 miles to our range, and that might make the difference between success and failure.

At Sabishiro Beach the two Americans were guests of the nearby town of Misawa City. The mayor had publicly announced that fliers of any nation seeking such an honorable goal should be hosted in friendship. Not all Japanese were so friendly, however, as the airmen discovered when their painstakingly prepared flight charts were stolen. It appeared likely that the culprits were members of the radically patriotic Black Dragon Society, who for weeks had been violently speaking out against the Americans and their proposed flight.

Pangborn and Herndon obtained new charts and were finally ready to go on October 2. To save weight, they carried no radio, no survival equipment, not even a seat cushion, and limited their food to hot tea and some fried chicken. Even so, with 915 gallons of fuel and 45 gallons of oil on board, the Bellanca was still exceeding its allowable maximum operating weight by 3,400 pounds.

As Pangborn prepared to climb on board the Bellanca, a small Japanese boy rushed out of the crowd and presented them a gift of five apples from his father’s orchard. Pangborn appeared deeply touched. Misawa City, like his hometown of Wenatchee, Wash., was famous for its apples.

Miss Veedol used the takeoff ramp that local villagers had built for Bromley and Gatty’s earlier attempt. A hill of sand had been packed down by a steam roller and then covered with a runway of planks that led down to the beach. Working like a ski jump, its purpose was to give the overloaded airplane an initial burst of acceleration. Even so, the Bellanca had trouble gaining flying speed as it rolled down onto the wet beach.

With its 425-hp Wasp engine screaming at full power, the monoplane was only up to 60 mph with two-thirds of the beach gone. Pangborn had estimated that he required 90 mph for liftoff. As Miss Veedol approached a pile of logs that marked the end of the makeshift runway, Pangborn could be seen rocking the aircraft from wheel to wheel in an attempt to break the drag of the wet sand. He later recounted: I was determined to get off, or pile into those logs. We had permission for only the one attempt and in no way was I going to spend any more time in Japan.

The aircraft staggered into the air with 100 yards to spare. Flying straight ahead, wallowing near a stall, the fuel-bloated Bellanca inched up above the waves. When they had a safe margin of height, Pangborn turned slowly onto a heading of 072 degrees–heading toward the Aleutians.

Three hours out, on track and approaching the Kurile Islands, Pangborn was satisfied that everything was operating normally and jettisoned the landing gear. The main structure fell away but two of the gear’s bracing rods did not drop clear. Pangborn realized that they posed a real threat to a safe belly landing and that he would have to work them free during the flight. Devoid of 300 pounds of landing gear and its drag, Miss Veedol climbed to 14,000 feet, where it picked up a good tail wind.

The sun went down and they began to encounter airframe icing in the clouds. To stay clear of clouds, they climbed to 17,000 feet where conditions were smooth and ice-free. Pangborn decided this was the ideal time to try to get rid of the two dangling struts. Handing over control to Herndon, the steel-nerved airman put his flying circus wing-walking skills to good use. Struggling against the frigid 100-mph slipstream, Pangborn eased out of the cockpit and placed his feet on the broad strut that supported the Bellanca’s wing. Holding on for dear life with one hand, with the other he removed one of the offending brace rods. Pangborn clambered back into the cockpit, warmed himself, and then repeated the procedure on the other side. Through the night it was bitterly cold and he recalled that the water in our canteens, and even our hot tea, froze.

The first real position check was a volcano in the Aleutians, and the two men were delighted to see it loom directly below them. Pangborn remained at the controls, with Herndon responsible for keeping the main wing tanks topped up from the huge auxiliary cabin tank. This required him to transfer fuel with a hand-operated wobble pump. Twice he forgot the task. The first time he was able to pump fuel fast enough to keep the spluttering Wasp engine running. On the second occasion, Herndon’s carelessness nearly cost the men their lives when the propeller stopped dead.

The Bellanca was not equipped with an electric starter. Pangborn had no alternative but to dive the airplane in the hope of getting the propeller to windmill. Yelling at Herndon to start pumping, Pangborn steepened the dive, desperately trying to turn the propeller in the rarefied air. They had lost 13,000 feet and were only 1,500 feet above the ocean when it finally began to windmill and the engine burst into life again.

The only word of their progress during the whole flight came from an island in the Aleutians where an amateur radio operator radioed to America that he had heard an airplane passing over above the clouds. No one was quite sure of their final destination, though Pangborn’s mother was adamant that her son would choose his hometown Wenatchee, Wash., as his landing site. She was among 30 locals who maintained a vigil at its little airfield.

Pangborn sighted the tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the northwestern coast of Canada and knew the worst of the navigation was over. He had been at the controls for more than 30 hours. Aware that the tricky job of belly landing lay not too far ahead of them, he decided to catch a few hours of sleep. He instructed Herndon to hold the current height and heading and to wake him when he saw the lights of a big city. That will be Vancouver, British Columbia, Pangborn yelled.

Once again Herndon’s inattention let them down. When Pangborn awoke some hours later, his cavalier co-pilot had wandered off course and missed both Vancouver and Seattle. Ahead of them was Mount Rainier. Pangborn decided to carry on inland to Boise, Idaho, which would also give them a new world’s nonstop distance record. However, two hours later, when it became evident the Boise area was covered in fog, they turned toward Spokane, Wash. When that destination appeared to be covered by low clouds, Pangborn decided to head for Wenatchee.

At 7:14 a.m. on October 5, 1931, the big red monoplane swooped in over the hills and circled Wenatchee’s little airfield, dumping fuel to reduce the chance of fire. Approaching slowly, Pangborn sent Herndon to the rear of the cabin, hoping that his weight would help hold the tail down during the landing. At the last moment he cut off the fuel and ignition switches and, as the Bellanca flared close to stalling, lowered it gently onto the ground. For a moment it was obscured by a cloud of dust; then, decelerating rapidly, Miss Veedol slithered to a stop, teetered for a moment and fell onto its left wingtip.

After being hugged by his mother and brother, Pangborn was amazed to discover that a representative of Asahi Shimbun was there to present the fliers with their $50,000 check. By some quirk of fate, the newspaper’s emissary had selected Wenatchee as their most likely landing point.

Among the little group that had waited through the night was Carl M. Cleveland, then a young reporter for the Wenatchee Daily World. He had commandeered the only telephone in hopes that he might get a world scoop. He was not disappointed: PANGBORN-HERNDON SPAN PACIFIC….BOY ARE WE GLAD TO GET HERE: PANGBORN PUTS IT….IT’S LIKE A DREAM COME TRUE. Cleveland’s hometown headlines were mirrored around the continent as he passed the story to his editor, who relayed Cleveland’s words to the wire services and the world.

The Asahi Shimbun prize was the only money awarded for the epic flight. As foreigners, Pangborn and Herndon were not eligible for the Imperial Aeronautic Association’s prize, nor did they qualify for the Seattle businessmen’s prize. From Pangborn’s point of view, worse was to follow. His relationship with Herndon was already strained, and their partnership quickly dissolved. Bickering between the two came to a head when Herndon and his mother, as financial backers for the transpacific flight, claimed the prize money and the cash realized from the sale of Miss Veedol. They gave Pangborn a paltry $2,500 for his efforts.

Pangborn vented his feelings in the Albany Times Union. “HERNDON INCOMPETENT SAYS PANGBORN,” blared the headlines. In the story that followed Pangborn disclosed that his co-pilot had known nothing of navigation because he had been romancing a girl instead of studying prior to their flight. He disclosed that Herndon had been little more than a passenger in Miss Veedol, stating, Out of the 200 hours we were in the air [since leaving New York], Herndon flew at most ten of those hours.

The nonstop transpacific flight eventually brought Pangborn other, more lasting rewards. He was honored with American aviation’s prestigious Harmon Trophy–joining other greats such as Charles Lindbergh and Jimmy Doolittle. And news came from Japan that, forgiven for his earlier transgressions, Pangborn had been awarded the Imperial Aeronautical Society’s White Medal of Merit.

Source Document

A unique story that history has forgotten but if by chance you are ever in Wenatchee, Washington take some time to go into town and visit the museum, dedicated to “Upside Down” Pangborn and his copilot, and the next time you are Japan and the apple you are eating has a familiar taste – take a minute to remember the contributions of Clyde “Upside Down” Pangborn’s contribution to the world of aviation.

Enjoy the video below and have a good weekend; however, remember that life is short. Keep friends and family close, stay true to your profession, and to those Aviators who will follow in your footsteps.

Robert Novell

March 6, 2026

To a Dear Friend Who was an Inspiration to All – February 27, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:12:00 +0000

RN3DB

February 27, 2027

I lost a dear friend last week to prostrate cancer and I am reminded of just how fragile life is, and more importantly why we should live each day as if it will be our last. My old friend Lee Gossett was a friend to all who knew him, he was a pilot of great skill, a devoted family man, and a man who was always there when you needed a friend. I will always remember our time together at his cabin on the Rogue river with friends, and I will miss our monthly calls where we tried to solve the world’s problems in fifteen minutes. Safe travels old friend, and God Bless you and those you have left behind.

Below is a video I would like everyone to see as a tribute to Lee whose nick name, given to him by the other pilots in SE Asia, was “Mr. Porter.” A true legend among the many great pilots of that time.

Robert Novell

February, 27, 2026

Night Stalker…The Origin of Stealth Technology – February 20, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:45:00 +0000

RN3DB

February 20, 2026

Happy Friday,

Welcome to the 3DB. The original stealth airplane was called the Night Stalker and was built in the late sixties by Lockheed for the Army to use in Vietnam; however, before we talk about that airplane let me tell you what I know about the current airplane, which is very similar, being used around the world as its replacement.

The replacement airplane that is currently being used by DOD, and several three letter government agencies in certain areas of the world, has also been sold to Colombia, Mexico, Jordan, and a few other countries. This airplane is a modified Schweizer sailplane that has been fitted with a Lycoming TIO-540 and a three bladed propeller. I believe that the U.S. arranged for the folks with “Plan Colombia” to buy four of these but I am not aware of how successful the program was. What I do know is that an old friend, who was killed in a helicopter crash about five years ago, served as the instructor for the Colombianos and he loved this airplane and its night time capabilities.

The picture below is one of the Colombian airplanes that my friend flew and there is a brief overview of the airplane below the picture. This official designation for this craft is SA2-37B.

Designed from the outset as a covert day/night surveillance platform, the RG-8A Condor Schweizer SA2-37B does not look like a covert spy plane. However, its sophisticated suite of FLIR, EO and electronic sensors, large payload, long endurance and low acoustic signature, enable this unusual aircraft to provide a comprehensive surveillance capability at relatively low cost.

To enable the Schweizer SA2-37B to operate effectively it was designed to fly quietly, using minimum power to reduce noise and this works so effectively that above 2000 feet the aircraft is virtually undetectable from the ground. The reduced acoustic signature was achieved by a clever aerodynamic design which carefully matched the propeller, engines and various sound muffling devices. Powered by a Lycoming T10-540 engine rated at 250 hp, in quiet mode the engine can be throttled back to between 1,100 – 1,300 rpm, generating just 65 hp which is sufficient to keep the aircraft flying slowly.

The clever aerodynamics and engine efficiency also gives the aircraft an excellent endurance of 12 hours or a radius of operations of 200 nautical mile while remaining on station for 7 hours. Generally the aircraft operates below 5000 feet, to give the optical sensors the best possible views, but it also has a 24,000 feet service ceiling and can undertake high level missions. The SA 2-37B can carry up to 510 pounds of sensors and associated equipment in a 70 cu ft payload bay in the fuselage. The payload bay was designed to accept modular systems enabling different sensors to be changed quickly.

Source Document

Now, The reason I wanted to start with the current version of a quiet airplane is to remind you that everything old is new again when our government has money to spend. I was told that the modifications and the R&D was a twenty million dollar plus program which does not include the basic airframe. I think someone reinvented the wheel when all the had to do was call 1-800-Lockheed.

OK, let’s talk about the original quiet /acoustic stealth airplane used in Vietnam. Enjoy…………………

Night Stalker

In 1966 the U.S. Navy sent a young Lieutenant by the name of Leslie J. Horn to South Vietnam to evaluate the use of night-vision devices in combat. Horn, a pilot and physicist, soon found himself in a patrol boat looking for Viet Cong in the canals and waterways of the Mekong Delta in the southern end of the country. With his Starlight scope, a handheld light amplifying device, he could see in the dark, but not through the thick foliage that lined the waterways.

One night, rounding a river bend, Horn had a surprise encounter with an armored junk. A fire fight erupted, and Horn began wondering if there wasn’t a better way to locate the enemy. What about a spy in the sky, some kind of aircraft that could find the VC without being seen or heard? “Being a physicist,” Horn recalls today, “I figured, Let’s see, noise is energy, so how do you build a plane with low energy? I started running some equations, and what fell out was a glider.” An airframe with a high lift-to-drag ratio wouldn’t need much power, so the engine could be smaller and therefore quieter. He sent the Office of Naval Research a detailed proposal for a glider—a sailplane, technically—with a muffled engine and a propeller turning slowly enough to avoid generating a buzz from the blade tips. Crewed by fliers equipped with Starlight scopes, the result would be a night reconnaissance airplane that was very nearly silent.

Americans believe that if we invent gadget X, we can get result Y and change situation Z for the better. So it’s no surprise that even before Horn had drawn up his proposal, others had visited the very same turf. The Department of Defense had been asking for new technologies to counter communist infiltration in Vietnam. Before being asked, the big thinkers at Lockheed Missiles & Space had started running analysis and brainstorming.

Lockheed Missiles & Space, based in Sunnyvale, California, had never built an airplane before. The division had produced the Polaris missile, designed for launch by nuclear submarines, and the first generation of spy satellites. But there was a war on, and Sunnyvale’s advanced programs group decided to take on the problem of detecting the Viet Cong. The group began by analyzing the available sensors and their ranges, and then the ranges at which various aircraft could be heard by the enemy. They discovered the problem: The VC could always hear an aircraft coming before the crew on the aircraft could hear or see the VC. What was needed, the Lockheed guys decided, was a super-quiet airborne sensor platform. They studied balloons, sailplanes, and conventional airplanes with mufflers, but found them all lacking. Then Don Galbraith, head of advanced design, suggested a powered sailplane, one with a muffler and an oversize, slow-turning propeller. Halfway around the world from young Lieutenant Horn, and about half a year earlier, Lockheed Missiles & Space had reached the same conclusion.

Lockheed project manager Stanley Hall, the designer of several sailplanes and known in the national soaring community, was pulled off a satellite project to supervise the quiet airplane. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, tossed in a meager $100,000 to build two proof-of-concept aircraft and sent Les Horn to be its representative at Lockheed. Horn arrived when construction was already under way; he thought he’d died and gone to R&D heaven. The tiny budget turned out to be an advantage. Because the project was so small, the military and corporate bureaucracies didn’t bother with oversight. The team set up shop behind a plywood partition in the back of the Lockheed executive hangar at the San Jose airport. Engineers and mechanics came from all over Lockheed, including the famed Skunk Works, where the exotic U-2 and SR-71 spy planes had been designed and built. But this spy plane was going to be a different: simple, designed to fly low and slow, and built and tested on the cheap.

For the airframe, Hall chose a well-known commercial sailplane, the Schweizer 2-32. His team took an ordinary 100-horsepower Continental O-200 engine and mounted it behind and slightly above the cockpit, so it made a bulge in the top of the airframe, like a camel’s hump. The propeller shaft ran above the canopy, outside the airplane, to a vertical pylon attached to the nose. They tested several propellers and chose an eight-foot-diameter model with four wooden blades. To quiet the engine further, the Sunnyvale team lined the inside of the cowling with fiberglass batting and ran the exhaust through a muffler from a 1958 Buick. Instead of using noisy gears, they connected the engine to the propeller shaft with V-belts, similar to fan belts. Les Horn recalls that it was the “only aircraft flying that was powered by rubber bands.” But the engineering and workmanship were first-rate. The prototype aircraft were designated QT-2: “2” for two-seater, and “QT” for “Quiet Thruster,” officially, though everybody knew it also stood for “on the Q.T.” (on the sly). The first flight was set for August 15, 1967, at an isolated municipal airport in Tracy, California, about 50 miles from San Jose.

Being modified sailplanes, the QTs had a single main wheel mounted in the center of the belly, two tiny
wheels under each wing tip to keep the tips from dragging, and a small nose wheel. When the test pilot, Quint Burden, started the engine, he taxied down the runway listing to port until, at around 15 knots (about 17 mph), he had enough speed to level the wings. After he took off, he circled the field, the big wooden propeller turning at a leisurely 800 rpm, about a third the speed of a normal prop for an engine of that size. “This was a really quiet airplane, I tell you,” recalls Hall, who was there for the test flights “We could fly it at 250 feet and barely hear it at all. At 800 feet it was completely silent” to ground observers. There had been a few studies of techniques for quieting airplanes, but for the most part the Lockheed team had to figure out acoustic stealth for itself. There was ground-level masking noise, to start with—crickets and frogs in the countryside, or the background sounds of a small town late at night, which Lockheed pegged at 50 decibels. Lockheed found the QT’s overall sound level was 70 decibels at 1,000 feet.

Then there was the QT’s acoustic signature, which was different from other aircraft. And it was so close to the threshold of hearing that it was perceived in very different ways. Hall thought it was “the gentle rushing sound of the ocean surf” while Burden, the test pilot, described it as an almost subliminal thub, thub, thub. Others were reminded of tires on a distant highway, the whirring of an electric fan, or a flock of birds overhead. The heart of acoustic stealth, the Lockheed guys discovered, is a widely observed but imperfectly understood relationship between detecting noise and perceiving and identifying its source. If you didn’t suspect an airplane was above you or notice that a few stars were being blocked and then reappearing, you you might not be aware of anything at all—even if a QT-2 were only a couple hundred feet overhead. Further tests revealed the QT was best flown cautiously, straight and level. A yaw, or turn on the vertical axis, could develop into a larger yaw than expected because the area around the nose pylon was so large it counteracted the stabilizing effect of the vertical tail. A banked turn could lead to a phenomenon called yaw-roll coupling; in a slow roll, which nobody ever tried, once upside down the wings would probably fall off. “It was a very tender aircraft,” says Les Horn, who notes that the original Schweizer has an 8-G rating, while the QT-2, weighed down by an engine and other gear, had a rating of barely 2.4 G. They needed a long runway for takeoff, then the airplanes could slowly climb to 5,000 feet and cruise at 110 knots. For minimum noise, though, the best speed was down around 70 knots, which was just one knot over the stall speed. In this so-called quiet mode, the craft required only 17 horsepower to stay aloft, according to the tests.

Toward the end of August 1967, the brass arrived at Tracy for a night demonstration. Asked to find the airplane, they peered upward and strained to hear something. Suddenly a bright light appeared directly above them, and the pilot boomed into his mike a single word, “Gotcha!”—amplified, of course, through strategically placed loudspeakers on the ground. Members of the delegation were suitably impressed. Further modifications were made—portholes in the sides to improve visibility for the backseat observers, a bigger vertical tail to offset the effect of the nose pylon, self-sealing fuel tanks, and military avionics. They received a couple of Starlight Scopes, and training began.

Then the QT-2PCs, as the new models were called, were disassembled, put on trailers, and loaded onto C-130s. They were flown to Soc Trang, in the Mekong delta, and the trailers were unloaded and wheeled into a secure hangar, with other trailers encircling them like covered wagons to keep them safe from prying eyes. It was January 1968, and as enemy activity picked up, sandbags were being stacked up around the base. Within a day the funky little airplanes were operational. Under the command of Horn, newly promoted to lieutenant commander, there were briefings in the late afternoon, first flights after sunset, refuelling around midnight, and second flights with a change of pilots until shortly before dawn. They got in 10 hours of flight time every night.

On January 30, 1968, communist forces launched a countrywide offensive during the Vietnamese new year, or TET. Soon enemy rockets and mortar shells were landing in Soc Trang. “I was supposed to get a little green card saying I was a noncombatant,” recalls a laconic Dale Ross Stith, a Lockheed avionics specialist. “What I actually got was an M-14 and 200 rounds.” With Soc Trang under fire, the QT-2s were flown to Vung Tau, which was a little more secure, and the missions continued.

The QT-2 test period in Vietnam in the early months of 1968 was the first use of stealth or low-detection technology in combat and was one of the first operational deployments of night-vision devices aboard aircraft. Night after night, the QT-2 crews peered into the Viet Cong world without the Viet Cong knowing it. Through their Starlight Scopes, the backseat observers saw—in crude, two-tone green and black—heavily loaded sampans traveling on darkened waterways, truck convoys bumping along on unpaved roads, and thousands of campfires twinkling beneath the jungle canopy. They saw VC sappers—demolition teams—with explosives climbing on a bridge along a major highway and onto ocean-going junks on a southern delta river. The observers radioed reports to the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, but at that time MACV, for the most part, couldn’t respond.

The U.S. military simply didn’t have the capability to fight at night. But the potential was clear enough to James McMillan, science advisor to General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. McMillan summoned Les Horn to Saigon and, giving him almost no time to prepare, told him to brief Westmoreland on the project. When Horn walked into the briefing room, “it was like a Time magazine centerfold,” he remembers, with not only Westmoreland but the U.S. ambassador, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others. McMillan introduced Horn as the project officer for what he felt was his most significant science achievement in Vietnam. Horn started his briefing, knees shaking, with a grease pencil and a board. Before the briefing was over, Westmoreland was standing with him at the board, sketching surveillance missions that he wanted to run. The prototype quiet spy plane had passed its test, and now it was time to develop its successor.

Back in California, Lockheed had already used its own funds to build what it called the Q-Star. A radiator from a Chevrolet Corvette sat in the nose, and the thing was even more peculiar-looking than the QT-2. The radiator cooled an exceptionally quiet marine Wankel rotary engine. When Curtiss-Wright, which owned the rights to the Wankel engine, decided against manufacturing an air-cooled version for aviation, the Q-Star became a footnote. Lockheed agreed to Stanley Hall’s proposal to develop the more conventional aircraft that became the YO-3A. (“Y” indicated pre-production; “O” stood for observation; and the meaning of “A” was unclear, possibly indicating later “B” and “C” models that were hoped for but that never materialized.) The YO-3A had a 220-horsepower Continental engine mounted in the nose and an ordinary propeller shaft in the traditional location but driven at low rpm by quiet rubber belts. It had retractable landing gear mounted inboard on the wings. The observer sat in the front under a large bubble canopy and the pilot in the back. The engine compartment had several kinds of acoustic insulation and a muffler mounted on the starboard side of the fuselage. It had a brand-new sensor package, including a laser target designator that was not compatible with anything the military services had at the time. But what really set the YO-3A apart from its predecessor was that, at $11 million dollars, the program was big enough to trigger every kind of corporate and military oversight, procurement headache, and interservice backstabbing imaginable. “We could have done better,” says Stanley Hall, nominally in charge of airframe design, in reality a man whose design decisions were overruled by higher-ranking executives. The YO-3As were not only much heavier than the QT-2s (3,700 pounds versus 2,500 pounds) but also a lot noisier, with a quiet cruising altitude of 1,500 instead of 800 feet.

With U.S. forces already starting to withdraw from the war, and funding levels falling, only 11 YO-3As were built. Nine were sent to Vietnam in early 1970. They were flown and maintained by the Army in Hue Phu Bai (where a few Marines flew them too) and Long Thanh North, a big base east of Saigon. The little nocturnal spy planes, nicknamed Yo-Yos, no longer enjoyed an advocate as high up the command ladder as Westmoreland, who was long gone. There was no effort to see what airborne stealth reconnaissance could achieve if given the right resources. And yet the Yo-Yos did their job well.

Much credit goes to the sensor package, which had leapfrogged several generations of technology from the QT-2’s primitive night vision scopes. Never mind the laser target designator, which didn’t work reliably and was seldom used. Protruding from the fuselage beneath the front seat was an ocular, or eyeball. It was like a periscope but controlled by a joystick, and gimballed, so that the horizon always looked horizontal in the viewer. Equipped with a light amplifier for night vision, along with an infrared viewer that sensed heat, it provided a view as clear as daytime of the nighttime scene below. The infrared viewer moved in tandem with an infrared illuminator, a kind of searchlight mounted in the belly, aft of the other optics. Mark Kizaric was a YO-3A observer.

A few months out of high school and a self-described pimple-faced kid, he became adept at using the ocular and manipulating the joystick. “After a while you’d get in a zone where you didn’t even think of yourself as being up in an aircraft,” he recalls. “You kinda lost contact with the real world. It was more like a video game. You’re just, you know, going along, you’re acquiring targets, noting positions, calling in artillery.

“Most of the time we worked with artillery,” says Kizaric, who is now an engineer in Wisconsin. “One especially strong memory is of a very large sampan moving down a river, 30 to 40 feet in length and riding very low in the water at about three or four o’clock in the morning where nobody’s supposed to be. We directed artillery fire, and though I’ll acknowledge a level of skill on my part, [there was] also an awful lot of luck. I happened to get a direct artillery hit. The sampan had to be loaded from stem to stern with ammunition, because there was a blinding flash that, even outside the ocular, lit up the whole night sky. I lifted my head away and there was this brilliant orange flash. A few seconds later I put my eye back in the ocular and the sampan had literally vanished.”

On other nights and missions, the Yo-Yos worked with the helicopter gunships of the 1st Air Cavalry. “We would go well ahead of the choppers and acquire the targets, because we were silent,” says Kizaric. “We would find, you know, people sitting around campfires, hot truck exhaust, something like that. We could literally see, in some cases, people moving around on the ground. We would note the position, call in the Cobra gunships, and lock onto the target with our ocular and illuminate the target. When people on the ground heard the choppers come in, all the fires go out and they start scrambling. But it was too late then. We had them on the IRI—the infrared illuminator. The gunships had a screen that could also pick up the infrared illuminator, and so they would home in and open fire.

“The YO-3 was a wonderful aircraft, when it worked,” Kizaric says. Unfortunately, the Yo-Yos didn’t always work. Fuel management glitches led to a few crash landings; one unexplained crash killed the pilot and observer. Though Lockheed fixed some of the fuel problems, morale dropped at the Long Thanh North base, and with it the number of flights per week. The Army discontinued the Yo-Yo flights in August 1971, and the military’s quiet spy plane program ended five years and many evolutionary changes after it began. How stealthy were the quiet planes? Where they flew, enemy radar was rare.

They were seen by the enemy from time to time, usually when the aircraft made silhouettes against cloud layers backlit by a full moon. On moonless nights, the little planes were functionally invisible as well as practically inaudible. None of the unarmed spy planes was ever shot down, and on a few occasions, the pilots flew less then a hundred feet above and beside enemy truck convoys at night, just to see if they could get away with it. They did. They left behind some minor folklore: captured VC who wondered how U.S. artillery had tracked them in the dark, and U.S. soldiers who thought they’d seen ghosts when a silent shadow appeared directly overhead.

After the Vietnam war, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries acquired some of the YO-3As, using them for several years to catch poachers. Most of the aircraft were bought by the FBI, which used them for about a decade for surveillance. Today NASA owns one YO-3A, currently mothballed, for making acoustic measurements of other aircraft. Most are in museums, and one is in a private collection awaiting restoration.

The two original QT-2s were sent to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. The school had already bought some Schweizer 2-32 sailplanes and designated them X-26As, to appear to be experimental, even though they were not, in order to get around complicated procurement regulations. The QT-2s were redesignated X-26Bs, and their strange front pylons turned out to have a practical use after all, giving student pilots a chance to learn at very low speeds about yaw-roll coupling, which also affects supersonic jets.

The airplanes have a few direct descendants. Schweizer Aircraft of Elmira, New York, has produced its own quiet reconnaissance aircraft line. The Coast Guard, the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, and the governments of Mexico and Colombia have used Schweizer’s single-engine RG-8 and pusher-puller twin-tail RU-38 to spot drug smugglers at night, and to electronically eavesdrop and monitor ground events without being detected.

But Schweizer’s quiet planes don’t fit the modern definition of stealth, which has come to refer to radar
instead of sound. Compared to the manned and unmanned reconnaissance aircraft of today, the QT-2s and YO-3As were primitive. Evolution has passed them by, and they seem like some exotic, long-extinct species. Their claim to history is not their effect on the Vietnam war, which was slight, but their early role in the developing stealth field and their exploitation of the physics of sound. Other means were found to accomplish the quiet birds’ purpose, and in wars fought today, U.S. military forces own the night.

Source Document

Enjoy the video below and have a good weekend, but if you have to work don’t feel bad – so do I; however, we all need to take time to remember that those who will follow in our footsteps will follow our example – Don’t compromise your professional standards and I will do the same.

Robert Novell

February 20, 2026

The Wright Brothers – Gone But Not Forgotten – February 13, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:01:00 +0000

RN3DB

February 13, 2026

Good Morning,

Benjamin Franklin said: “The only guarantees in life are taxes and death.” That being said, the Wright Brothers paid their taxes and then they left behind their mark on history and moved on. I paid my respects a few years ago to the two Brothers and gave them my thanks for their work which allowed me to be a part of the “Third Dimension.”

If you ever in Dayton, Ohio go by their final resting place and quietly thank them for yourself and if you don’t see yourself going there any time soon then take a look at the pictures below (these photos are from my cell phone and the quality could be better).

Robert Novell

February 13, 2026

The Legacy Carriers – Gone But Not Forgotten – February 6, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:12:00 +0000

RN3DB

February 6, 2026

Good Morning,

This week I want to remind everyone of those air carriers that are gone but not forgotten. Sad to think that we have lost all of air national/international carriers except for six….seven if you include Southwest. Take some time to look back and remember those who are “Gone BUT NOT Forgotten.

Enjoy…..

1978 Roll Call of Legacy Carriers

Alaska Airlines	Northwest
Aloha Airlines	Ozark
Air Cal	Pacific Southwest
American	Pan Am
Braniff	Piedmont
Continental	Republic
Delta	Southwest
Eastern	TWA
Frontier	United
Hawaiian	US Air
National	Western

Mergers and failures are difficult to keep up with, but there are some significant changes that took place in the 1980s and the decades after that can provide us with some perspective of the state of the industry. Consider the following facts:

Aloha Airlines failed in 2008
Air Cal was absorbed by American in 1987
Braniff failed in 1982 and Braniff II failed in 1989
Continental is still with us but the current Continental is a remake of the original Continental that was bought out by TI/Frank Lorenzo
Eastern failed in 1990
Frontier was absorbed by Continental in 1985
National was absorbed by Pan AM in 1980
Northwest was absorbed by Delta in 2008/2009
Ozark was absorbed by TWA in 1986
Pacific Southwest was absorbed by US Air in 1988-
Pan Am failed in 1990
Piedmont was absorbed by US Air in 1989
Republic was absorbed by Northwest in 1980
TWA was absorbed by American in 2001
Western was absorbed by Delta in 1987

The following airlines are still in operation: Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, United Airlines, US Air, and Southwest Airlines.

I have closed with pictures of the fallen carriers, so enjoy, take some time to look back at the history of commercial aviation, and never forget that job security in aviation is a myth even in the best of times.

Robert Novell

February 6, 2026

Gone but Not Forgotten

Aloha Airlines failed in 2008

Air Cal was absorbed by American in 1987

Braniff failed in 1982 and Braniff II failed in 1989

Eastern failed in 1990

Frontier was absorbed by Continental in 1985

National was absorbed by Pan AM in 1980

Northwest Orient-–Northwest Airlines

Northwest was absorbed by Delta

Ozark was absorbed by TWA in 1986

Pacific Southwest was absorbed by US Air in 1988

Pan Am failed in 1990

Piedmont was absorbed by US Air in 1989

Republic was absorbed by Northwest in 1980

TWA was absorbed by American in 2001

Western was absorbed by Delta in 1987

The Race to Be First – January 30, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:18:00 +0000

RN3DB

January 30, 2026

Happy Friday and welcome to the 3DB,

This week our topic is the race to be first in bringing jet engine airliners in to the commercial arena. We all know about the German technology that brought us in to the jet age and how the British and the Americans raced to be first with a jet powered airliner but do you know about the man named Tupelev?

That is our topic this week. Enjoy……….

Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev

(1888 to 1972)

Before the Space Race, before the fatal fire on Apollo 1 or the deaths of three cosmonauts returning to Earth aboard Soyuz 11, there was a Jet Race, whose tragedies and triumphs are now mostly forgotten. Begun in the last years of World War II, when the combatants struggled to get military jets into the skies, the competition continued into the 1950s, when the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union were scrambling to field the first passenger jets.

The British were the first to build a passenger jetliner, the de Havilland D.H.106 Comet, which was tested in 1949 and started flying scheduled routes in 1952. But two years later, when two of the airliners broke up in mid-air within four months of each other, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the fleet grounded. The Soviets can claim the first continuous commercial jet service, which they began with the -104 in 1956, two years ahead of the debut of the iconic Boeing 707 and the resumption of flights by the Comet. The -104 also had its share of disasters, but Tupolev and the Soviets managed to learn from them and keep flying.

Considering the breakneck pace of the -104’s development, it seems a wonder that it flew at all. These days, when a new aircraft can spend a decade or more in design and testing, it is hard to imagine the pace of the early cold war, when aerospace manufacturers cranked out rapidly evolving generations of military aircraft and the technology spilled over somewhat haphazardly into civil aviation. The -104 was created in 14 months in 1954-55 on the platform of the Tu-16 long-range bomber, known in the West as the Badger, which was itself virgin technology.

(TU-16 Badger)

During this hectic period, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev was at the height of his long, eventful career. Born in 1888 near the central Russian city of Tver, Tupolev went to college at the Moscow Imperial Technical School. One of his professors was Nikolai Zhukovski, the revered father of Russian aviation, who in 1909 taught the country’s first university course in aerodynamics.

Zhukovski and Tupolev stuck together after the Bolshevik revolution, creating the Central Aero/Hydrodynamics Institute, or TSAGI, in 1918, the cerebrum for a vast industry to come. The first aircraft with Tupolev’s name on it, a half-wooden monoplane designated ANT-1, flew in 1923. Two years later, Tupolev launched his first military craft, a reconnaissance sesquiplane called ANT-3.

However, Tupolev was caught in the madness of Joseph Stalin’s party purges. He was arrested as a saboteur in October 1937, and under torture confessed to a wide range of “crimes” against the Soviet people.

Stalin and his secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, soon realized they had made a mistake, however, war was threatening Europe, and without its guiding spirit, Soviet aviation was in chaos. Tupolev was rescued from Moscow’s Butyrskaya prison in late 1938, and transferred to Bolshevo prison to head a new design bureau controlled by Beria’s secret police, the NKVD. There he created a Stalinist version of Schindler’s list, handing his captors the names of some 150 imprisoned engineers and scientists whom he declared essential to his patriotic work. Beria dutifully retrieved this elite cadre from throughout the Gulag archipelago, undoubtedly saving the lives of most of them.

While still prisoners, Tupolev and his fellow designers created the Tu-2 bomber. The Soviet supreme court granted Tupolev clemency as the Nazis overran western Russia in July 1941, just in time for him to evacuate his workshop to Omsk, in Siberia.

After the war, Soviet aviation was enriched by technology shared willingly or otherwise by the country’s Western allies. In 1944, four American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were forced to make emergency landings at Vladivostok after a raid on Japan. Stalin had them flown to Moscow and set Tupolev to work reverse-engineering them to create a Soviet version. The result was the Tu-4, which first flew in May 1947.

(TU-4)

Simultaneously the master designer developed the Soviet Union’s first jet-powered bomber, using Rolls-Royce Nene and Derwent engines, which Britain briefly made available under license. This aircraft was the Tu-12, which flew in December 1947. In the early 1950s, Tupolev returned to turboprop technology for the Tu-95 strategic bomber—the Bear—which was still flying when the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991.

(TU-95 Bear)

Even in this frenzy of military invention, Tupolev did not forget airliners. He scavenged parts of his precious Superfortresses to make a trial civilian version of the Tu-4. And as soon as the Tu-16 was aloft in 1952, he began lobbying the Communist hierarchy for a passenger variant. Tupolev’s conversion plans made little progress while Stalin was alive. The dictator traveled, with rare exceptions, by train, and thought ordinary citizens should do the same. In Stalin’s mind, airplanes and the limited resources available to build them were for war.

On the other hand, Nikita Khrushchev, the premier who took power after Stalin died in 1953, loved flying. He saw civil aviation as a pillar in his grand strategy to “catch and overtake” the West. Tupolev was invited back in late 1953 to pitch the civilian Tu-16 idea to the Communist Party Central Committee, and by June 1954 had an order to get cracking. The Tu-104 was on its way.

Converting a spanking new jet bomber to civilian use turned out to be not so simple. The bomb bay, for example, had to be transformed into a baggage compartment. But the core problem was that a passenger liner needed a pressurized cabin, and numerous extra holes cut into the fuselage for windows and doors.

The British investigation into the Comet failures was delayed because both crashes had taken place at sea, making wreckage recovery difficult. Tupolev from the first rightly suspected the airplane’s body had suffered metal fatigue. One of his adjustments was simply to add heft to the -104, thickening the fuselage skin to 1.5 mm, compared to the Comet’s 0.9 mm. The extra weight halved the -104’s range to 1,900 miles and considerably increased fuel costs, but the apparatchiks approved of Tupolev’s caution.

(British Comet)

Tupolev also opted for round windows instead of the Comet’s square ones, eliminating the corners as pressure points. He built an enormous testing pool at TSAGI’s headquarters, outside Moscow, where jet mockups could be submerged to simulate atmospheric pressures. And he outfitted the -104 with avionics that Soviet aircraft hadn’t used before, such as radar.

By the late 1950s, Tupolev’s shop had burgeoned to about 10,000 employees and occupied a sprawling complex in the industrialized eastern part of Moscow; across the street from the design center was a factory for prototypes. This mass of humanity was efficient enough that the -104’s first test flight took place two months ahead of schedule, in June 1955.

By March 1956, Khrushchev was ready to use Tupolev’s creation to score an international PR victory. He ordered the -104 to fly to London carrying officials who were laying the groundwork for an East-West summit there. According to a Russian TV documentary, Khrushchev himself wanted to ride the little-tested jetliner into Heathrow, and Tupolev had to race to the impetuous leader’s dacha to talk him out of it.

For British aviation professionals still mourning the loss of the Comets, the -104’s arrival was a mini-Sputnik moment: an unsuspected Soviet technological advance falling from the sky, causing both admiration and anxiety. “The Russians are far ahead of us in the development of such aircraft and jet engines,” retired RAF Air Chief Marshal Philip Joubert de la Ferté told the BBC at the time. “Many in the West will have to change their views on the progress made by Soviet aircraft technology.”

Julia Tupolev’s interior for the -104 was a sensation in itself. Confounding stereotypes of Bolshevik austerity, it offered lavish comfort in the air. “The cabin fittings seemed to be from the 1930s Orient Express school of luxury,” with porcelain toilets and heavy curtains, a former ground staffer at Gatwick recalled decades later in an online enthusiasts’ forum. Pilot Vladimir Ushof remembers that the cabin was “in the style of Catherine the Great.” Within a year or two, economy conquered Mrs. Tupolev’s aesthetics, and the -104 was reconfigured with standard row seating for 70 passengers rather than the original 50.

The aircraft’s triumphant reception could not mask trouble under the hood. Tupolev had not managed or bothered to control the fiery exhaust the hastily converted bomber emitted at takeoff. “Sheets of flame from the aircraft’s ‘wet start’ [starting a turbine engine with fuel already pooled in it] would cause a spectacular exodus of ground staff,” a former Gatwick employee recollected.

Back home in Russia, first-generation -104 pilots were doing their best to iron out other serious wrinkles before the airplane took on innocent members of the general public. For one thing, runways both inside and out of the Soviet Union were too short for the new jet, which took off at 186 mph, compared with an average of 124 mph for piston-engine aircraft. According to the -104’s specs, safe takeoff and landing required a 1.5-mile runway. When the airplane started flying, only one Soviet civilian airport, at Omsk in central Siberia, met the requirement. The tarmac at France’s Le Bourget, where the -104 was naturally sent to show off at the biannual Paris airshow, was 1.4 miles long. Amsterdam, an early commercial destination, offered just 1.1 miles.

Landing was further complicated by the -104’s absence of reverse. If a pilot felt the brake was insufficient to halt the barreling 67-plus-ton craft, he could deploy two parachutes from the tail. This strategy held its own risks, though. If you had a crosswind, the plane could start spinning like a weather vane.

Nevertheless, the Tu-104 entered regular passenger service in September 1956 and served Aeroflot faithfully for more than 20 years. About 200 were built. They enabled those Soviets privileged enough to be cleared for foreign travel to fly nonstop around Europe, and ordinary citizens to more conveniently reach remote domestic destinations like Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal.

To prove the first journey to London was not a fluke, Khrushchev sent the Bolshoi Ballet back on a -104 later in 1956. At one point, Aeroflot landed three -104s at Heathrow simultaneously, to disprove a British press report that only one prototype was operational.

When the -104 did run into trouble, it was not from the takeoffs and landings that harrowed the pilots, nor from the fuselage, which Tupolev’s measures indeed rendered sturdier than the de Havilland Comet’s. Rather, the aircraft could not always remain stable in the wicked currents it encountered at its little-explored cruising altitude.

After four incidents of “the grab” in 1958, an inquiry was launched. With no public outcry to fear, the Kremlin kept the -104 flying, though reducing its maximum altitude to 10,000 meters (32,841 feet), and gave Tupolev a month to come up with remedies. Soviet engineers identified the basic flaw in the aircraft’s angle of attack in flight, and changes were made in the wing design and flight controls, which resolved many, but not all, of the problems.

In the early 1960s a -104 squadron, devoted to ferrying government grandees, flew Khrushchev’s successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, on state business at home and abroad. (Khrushchev himself stuck mostly with a personal pilot named Nikolai Tsybin, who, the -104 flyers remember with some lingering superiority, never got the hang of handling jets.) But Soviet civil aviation’s moment of glory on the world stage was brief. In 1958 the Boeing 707 began offering passenger service with a range of 6,250 miles, more than triple the -104’s, and the Soviet Union never really caught up.

Transport bureaucrats wasted valuable years debating whether jet travel was suitable for civilians after all—today, the pilots guess that the doubts were partly spurred by the -104’s serial accidents. Tupolev’s own next effort, the Tu-114, was a conversion of the Tu-95 transcontinental bomber. The most prolifically produced Soviet airliner of the 1960s was another turboprop, the Ilyushin Works’ Il-18.

(TU-114)

(IL-18)

It wasn’t until 1972 that Tupolev returned with the first jet he designed from scratch as a passenger carrier, the Tu-154. Within the Communist sphere of influence, it was a hit. More than 1,000 Tu-154s were manufactured, and some 200 are still flying.

(TU-154)

Aeroflot retired the Tu-104 in 1979. The military kept a few around for staff transportation until 1981, when a -104 crashed on takeoff from Pushkin, near Leningrad, killing 52, including most of the top commanders of the Soviet navy’s Pacific fleet. Investigations determined that the airplane was overloaded, but the catastrophe stirred the ghost of Garold Kuznetsov, and the rest of the fleet was mothballed.

In the post-Soviet period, Russian civilian aircraft makers have performed dismally. Aeroflot, which is still in service as Russia’s international flag carrier, and the new privatized airlines that have taken over most domestic routes have all moved to retool with Boeings and Airbuses, despite steep import tariffs. Russian-made MiG and Sukhoi warplanes continue to sell around the world, but the only recent Tupolev sale on the civilian side was to Syria, whose national airline agreed in 2011 to buy three Tu-204s for a reported $108 million. Given subsequent events in Syria, even that deal looks questionable.

The Kremlin focused its civil aviation efforts over the past decade on developing the so-called Sukhoi Superjet, a 75- to 90-seat single-aisle craft designed to compete with Embraer and Bombardier in the global short-haul market. So far, the Brazilians and Canadians have little to fear.

(Sukhoi Superjet)

While the Superjet made what was supposed to be its maiden flight in 2008, just a dozen or so are actually in service today, mostly with Aeroflot. The only international customer to date is Armenia’s national airline, Armavia. A contract with Indonesia’s Kartika Airlines was set back—along with the Superjet’s prospects in general—when a demonstration flight in May 2012 crashed into a mountain in West Java, killing all 45 people on board. Even the patriotic ex-Tu-104 pilots can muster little enthusiasm for the unlucky short hauler. “They can build it, but who will buy it?” quips Anatoly Gorbachev as he waits for a crowded bus that will creep through the evening rush-hour traffic from Sheremetyevo into Moscow.

Back in town, the great Tupolev Works on the Yauza River is physically as well as economically diminished. The design center soldiers on in the same unprepossessing building as Vladimir Rigmant’s museum. But the factory has been torn down and in its place stand gleaming new condos sporting the name “Tupolev Plaza.” Yet the humble rooms, for decades, spawned technology that matched the world’s best and sometimes claimed the title.

Source Document

Interesting to find out the Russians won the Jet Race, but even more interesting is that Stalin had Tupolev sent to Siberia as a spy. I am not sure where I acquired the fact that Stalin had twenty million of his fellow Russians killed, and many more sent to Siberia, but considering his reign of terror I am surprised that they were able move forward at all. I think WWII might have changed that…….what do you think?

Have a good weekend, enjoy time with family and friends, and protect your profession as you would yourself.

Robert Novell

January 30, 2026

Who Was the First Pilot to be Shot Down During the Vietnam Conflict – January 23, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:48:00 +0000

RN3DB

January 23, 2026

Good Morning,

For most people the Vietnam War is a distant memory, much like the Korean War, but today I want to go back to 1954 and tell you the story of “Earthquake McGoon……a man who always had a warm smile for all he met and a dedicated aviator who gave his all to the cause.

Enjoy…..

The Shootdown of “Earthquake McGoon”

James B. McGovern, Jr. was born on February 4, 1922, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Growing up, his brother recalled in a 1999 interview that, “I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but all he ever talked about was becoming a pilot,” he said. Having graduated high school in 1940, the young McGovern got a job working at Wright Aircraft Engineering Company in Patterson, NJ, and trained at the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics. After the United States entered World War II, the five-foot nine-inch tall, then-180 pound, aircraft mechanic enlisted in the Army Air Corps on May 21st, 1942, to learn to fly.

Arriving in China in November of 1944, James McGovern joined the 14th Air Force – 23rd Fighter Group’s 75th “Tiger Shark” squadron, part of the Flying Tigers volunteer group. He was credited with shooting down four Japanese Zero fighters and destroying five on the ground.

At war’s end in 1945, Major General Claire Chennault, founder of both the Flying Tigers and the 14th Air Force, recruited McGovern and other veteran pilots for his next enterprise, a commercial airline called Civil Air Transport (CAT). Under contract to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime, CAT flew civilian and military missions during China’s civil war, and would later help evacuate thousands of refugees to Taiwan before the Communist victory in 1949.

Having bulked up during the war to 260 pounds, the ex-fighter pilot liked the roomy cockpits of CAT’s war-surplus C-46 transports but still sometimes used a wicker chair instead of the standard pilot’s seat.

A saloon owner and ex-sailor, Ed F. Gingle, but known to most in the Orient as “Pop”, dubbed the big aviator “Earthquake McGoon”, after a hulking hillbilly wrestler character in the then-popular “Li’l Abner” comic strip. “It didn’t bother him. He was a character himself, and I think he thrived on it,” John McGovern, his younger brother, said.

However, during a flight in December of 1949, McGovern ran out of fuel, made an emergency night landing in a riverbed and was captured by Chinese Communist troops. When he turned up safe six months later, other pilots joked that his captors “got tired of feeding him.” But McGovern had argued his way out, saying “You keep saying you’re going to release me but you haven’t, so I don’t believe anything you say. You’re liars.” So, the Chinese soldier let McGovern go free in May of 1950.

Civil Air Transport moved to Taiwan in 1949 and a year later was secretly acquired by the CIA, which continued its commercial service as a cover for clandestine activities.

The First Indochina War…

In 1953, France asked the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower for American help in fighting a Communist rebellion in colonial Indochina. Soon, CAT was there, flying supply missions with French insignia painted over the company logo.

Wallace “Wally” Buford, who had flown B-24 bombers during World War II and C-119s in Korea, and a recipient of two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Purple Heart, was studying for an engineering degree in 1953 when he saw a notice that the government was seeking experienced C-119 pilots. So, he signed up.

A year later, McGovern and Buford, 28, were among two dozen Americans who earned about $3,000 a month air-dropping supplies to the besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. On May 6, 1954, their unarmed C-119 Flying Boxcar, #149 (originally U.S. Air Force tail number 49-149, as it was on loan to the French Air Force from the USAF’s 314th Troop Carrier Wing), and five other C-119s, took off from Haiphong’s Cat Bi Airport. McGovern’s plane was carrying a parachute-rigged Howitzer artillery piece to aid the French soldiers at Camp Isabelle – the southernmost firebase of Dien Bien Phu.

On May 6, 1954, their unarmed C-119 Flying Boxcar, #149 (originally U.S. Air Force tail number 49-149, as it was on loan to the French Air Force from the USAF’s 314th Troop Carrier Wing), and five other C-119s, took off from Haiphong’s Cat Bi Airport. McGovern’s plane was carrying a parachute-rigged Howitzer artillery piece to aid the French soldiers at Camp Isabelle – the southernmost firebase of Dien Bien Phu.

The first aircraft in the flight, flown by Steve Kusak, safely dropped its load on Isabelle. But as McGovern approached the drop zone, however, his aircraft was hit twice by 37mm anti-aircraft fire, in both the left engine and stabilizer. “I’ve got a direct hit,” other pilots heard McGovern say.

Immediately, the French crew of “kickers” in the aircraft’s rear, named Jean Arlaux (on his first combat mission), Bataille, Moussa (a Malayasian), and Rescouriou, dropped their cargo, as McGovern shut down the burning engine, and climbed over the mountains surrounding the fort.

With one engine afire, McGoon nursed the aircraft another 75 miles southward, into Laos. Approaching 4,000-foot mountains, he radioed fellow C-119 pilot Steve Kusak for help in finding level ground. “Turn right,” said Kusak, who was directing McGovern towards an airstrip near the Nam Ma River.

Forty minutes after being hit, McGovern made his last radio transmission, “Looks like this is it, son.” His crippled C-119 Flying Boxcar cartwheeled into a Laos hillside near the Sang Ma river in Houaphan Province. The crash killed McGovern, Buford, and two of the French crewmen instantly. But two of the cargo handlers, French Lieutenant Jean Arlaux and Private Moussa, were thrown clear and survived, but were captured by the Vietminh. Moussa died a few days later of his injuries.

McGovern & Buford were the first two Americans to die in combat in Vietnam. The day after the crash, the garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered, ending the 57-day siege. No effort were made to recover McGovern or Buford’s remains then.

In the May 24, 1954, edition of Life magazine, an article called “The End for Earthquake” ran, detailing the pilot’s shoot-down, and displaying photographs that would become all to common in the years of conflict that would follow.

Years of Silence…

After a French officer learned from Ban Sot villagers in 1959 about three graves in the area, CIA officials stifled his report. “They indicated in a vague way that they feared a lawsuit if they gave the relatives false information. Therefore, no one notified McGovern’s or Buford’s relatives,” according to Felix Smith, a retired CAT pilot.

Smith recalled McGovern as being “a real big-hearted guy,” but not the “wild man” as the press widely reported. “He was a bon vivant, happy-go-lucky. He loved kids, and he was the guy who in a tense situation would come out with some joke.”

The search for McGovern’s remains came to light again in October of 1997, when a “Joint Task Force-Full Accounting” team investigating an unrelated crash near Ban Sot saw an old C-119 propeller in the village. It was assumed to be French in origin, until William Forsyth, the agency’s top researcher, heard about McGovern from a former pilot, and began to search for old news clippings about the crash.

A year later, Forsyth, whose specialty is aerial photo analysis, spotted three “probable graves” in a 1961 photo of the Ban Sot area. But with Vietnam War MIAs taking precedence, officials moved “Case 3036”, as it was called, to the back burner with other “Cold War losses.”

There it stayed until a group of ex-CAT pilots, led by Felix Smith, launched a letter-writing campaign, and lobbied Congress and former intelligence officials, to have the case upgraded for immediate action. Retired spy Dudley Foster, who once served in a liaison role with CAT, persuaded George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, to back the effort.

With “Case 3036” given new priority, task force investigators revisited Ban Sot, where in July of 2001, they interviewed four witnesses to the 1954 crash and three who pointed out burial sites. Skeletal remains were discovered in an unmarked grave in northern Laos in December of 2002.

Phimpha, a 65-year-old Laotian farmer, recalled that he was fishing in a river when the plane came down, and later saw three bodies, among them a “very large Caucasian with a round face, still strapped in the pilot’s seat.”

A few days later, Phimpha noticed fresh grave mounds near a road. His wife, Thok, 67, recalled that as a girl she “always ran past that location because of the ghosts thought to be there.”

Belated Honors…

On February 24, 2005, James McGovern was posthumously recognized by the French government, along with his co-pilot Wallace Buford, for their sacrifice. Seven of the other surviving pilots of the Civil Air Transport were awarded the Legion of Honour with the rank of Knight by the President of the Republic of France for their actions to supply Dien Bien Phu during the siege.

The skeletal remains found in 2002 were positively identified in September 2006 as McGovern’s by laboratory experts at the U.S. military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. He was interred in Arlington National Cemetery on May 24, 2007, in Section 8-M4, Row 11, Site 6.

Source Document

Enjoy the weekend, take some time to kick back and do nothing, and always keep friends and family close…..life is short.

Robert Novell

January 23, 2026

Panagra….The Airline Pan Am Created To Dominate Latin and South America – January 09, 2026

Robert Novell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 05:00:00 +0000

RN3DB

January 09, 2026

Good Morning,

I have an interesting story to tell you, along with a few facts, about how Pan Am, my favorite airline, spread their wings to dominate South America and built an airline to connect with North America. Panagra is the name of the airline and my story today tells about how this all came about.

Panagra was a joint venture between Pan Am and W.R. Grace Company. Pan Am was responding to a request to provide service south in to Latin and South America but knew there would be difficulty trying to compete with W.R. Grace who controlled the west coast of South America, through their steamship routes, and were not about to let some outsider into their territory—especially an airline. Juan Trippe knew that unless he could get Grace on board there were be no landing rights given to Pan Am for service into Grace’s territory. Pan Am’s negotiations with Grace culminated in the formation of Pan American-Grace Airways—Panagra—with fifty percent being owned by Grace and fifty percent by Pan Am.

Now that you know how it all came about let’s talk about Panagra and at the conclusion of the article I will have some interesting facts that will reveal the rest of the story.

Enjoy………………

Panagra – The Pan Am Airline

(The Pan American – Grace Airways, Inc. History 1929-1967)

Panagra provided air transportation for passengers, mail, and cargo over a 4,251-mile network of routes throughout Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Panagra, thus, had accomplished a pioneering job second to none. Less than a year after its inception, it had linked the Americas from the United States to Argentina with a direct, regularly scheduled passenger, mail and freight service. The trip from New York to Buenos Aires by plane could now be made in eleven days which was less than half the time it took by steamer.

Panagra carried American aviation farther than it had ever been before. No other U. S. airline was operating over such great distances at that time; American aviation had barely begun to stretch its wings beyond its territorial boundaries with a few short routes through Central America and the Caribbean area.

Panagra was the first airline in South America to develop and apply airways weather forecasts – and professional meteorologists furnish today all company planes with complete reports on the weather en-route and at destination at all hours. It was the first to adopt the controllable pitch propeller, first to use the revolutionary constant speed propeller, first to deploy a fully equipped radar fleet, and first to introduce the DC-6, DC-6B, DC-7 and DC-8 to South America.

During its three and a half decades of serving the Americas, Panagra did more than carry passengers, freight, and mail. Time and again the airline’s planes were sent on missions of mercy carrying a vial of precious lifesaving medicine to a dying man, an iron lung to a girl’s stricken with polio, or a shipment of drugs to arrest the spread of an epidemic.

In 1961 in Chile, and in 1948 in Peru, when earthquakes literally shook cities to pieces Panagra placed its entire facilities at the disposal of the stricken nations airlifting tons of medical supplies and food to the disaster area and flying out the victims. Panagra was an important factor in the economic and industrial development of South America. By stimulating an increased flow of trade and travel within the Hemisphere, the airline helped draw South America closer economically and culturally to the United States.

From early 1943 until the merger with Braniff 25 years later there was only one Panagra aircraft lost in operations with no fatalities. A non-compete clause in the agreement between Pan American World Airways, Grace, and Panagra made Panama the northern end of Panagra’s route system.

In those early days airports were unknown, radio facilities were nonexistent and meteorology, as we know it today, was unheard of. As routes were expanded and frequencies increased, the airline had to build its own airports, equip its own overhaul and maintenance shops and set up its radio and weather stations along the entire route.

The History began on September 13, 1928, when a tiny single-engined Peruvian Airway’s Fairchild FC-2 monoplane with four passengers and a few letters took off from a racetrack in Lima and landed 550 mile away, in a soccer field in Talara, Peru. This was the inauspicious beginning of scheduled commercial air transportation along the west coast of South America and the start of Panagra (Pan American Grace Airways).

A few months later, with the backing of Pan American World Airways and W.R. Grace & Co, Peruvian Airways (founded by Harold B. Harris in 1928) became Panagra. Between 1929 and 1942, Harris held the positions of Vice-President and Chief Operations Officer.

On October 12, 1929, a Panagra tri-motored Ford took off from the airport in Buenos Aires, cruised at a normal altitude over the flat pampas, and after stopping to refuel at Mendoza, Argentina, crossed the formidable Cordillera of the Andes through the Up Sallata Pass at the then unheard of altitude of 18,000 feet. Eight and a half hour after leaving the Argentine capital, the little Panagra airplane landed at Santiago’s Los Cerrillos Airport making the first commercial flight across the Andes.

By 1930 Panagra planes had shortened the distance between New York and Buenos Aires to seven days, and two American airmen had written another stirring chapter in the colorful history of aviation. One of these men was Lloyd R. “Dinty” Moore, a Panagra pilot, who had made an “impossible” dawn to dusk flight between Peru and Panama to deliver the mail on schedule to another pilot who flew it from there to the U. S. The other pilot was Charles A. Lindbergh.

Scheduled airline service between the Americas was now an accomplished fact. Lindbergh and Moore had proven it could be done. Panagra planes were cruising up and down the Hemisphere on a once-a-week schedule. With incredible speed the service was further expanded. More planes were put into operation. New routes were inaugurated. Other cities in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia were quickly linked with the main trunk line along the west coast of South America.

Just before Pearl Harbor, when war with the Axis was imminent, Panagra, with the assistance of the respective South American governments and at the request of our own State Department, first paralleled and then replaced the services of German controlled SEDTA in Ecuador and Lufthansa in Peru and Bolivia, This was designed to avert an economic and transportation crisis and remove the Nazi threat from this continent.

In 1942, due to the need to move heavy freight, in support of the war effort, Panagra converted a couple of its DC-3’s into freighters. Panagra started the first all-cargo route of any American flag airline when it inaugurated a route between the Canal Zone in Panama and Lima. Following the war the pioneer U. S. airline was able to obtain the larger, faster four-engined aircraft needed to inaugurate night operations and eliminate overnight layovers on its route.

Panagra’s DC-3’s, 4’s and 6’s featured broad yellow stripes on the wings. These stripes were to help in locating a plane that went down in the rugged terrain. In the first 15 years of operations the safety record was comparable to US domestic operations under significantly more challenging conditions. From early 1943 until the merger with Braniff 25 years later there was only one Panagra aircraft lost in operations with no fatalities. Indeed as the Panagra pilots continued their careers with Braniff and other airlines after the merger, not one life was lost with a Panagra pilot up front!

By 1946, elapsed time between Panama and Buenos Aires had been shortened to less than 24 hours. With the entry of Braniff International into the Latin American market, Panagra’s started to fly to Miami and New York in the 1950’s. While this provided through plane service, north of Panama these were actually Pan American flights using Panagra planes and crews to Miami and National Airlines on up to New York.

By May 1960, Panagra had introduced DC-8, jets to cut travel time between New York and the Argentine capital to less than 12 hours flying time. In developing air routes where none previously existed, Panagra had to start from scratch.

Its intercontinental DC-8 jet service linked Buenos Aires, Santiago, Antofagasta, La Paz, Lima, Guayaquil, Quito, Cali and Panama City with Miami and New York. These 585-mile-an-hour jet planes accommodated 24 first class and 94 tourist class passengers in spacious and comfortable cabins that were equipped with bed sized berths, a Fiesta Lounge and a snack bar.

Braniff began negotiations to purchase Panagra during the Charles Beard administration. Negotiations were later renewed and in December of 1965, a deal was made for the purchase of W.R. Grace’s 50% interest. The deal was concluded on March 17, 1966 when the remaining 50% interest held by Pan American World Airways was acquired. This time however, the offer for the airline was raised to $30 million from the original $8 million offer.

In July of 1966, the Civil Aeronautics Board approved the plan and President Lyndon Johnson allowed the merger to proceed. The merger and integration of Panagra’s operations was completed on February 1, 1967. Braniff acquired Panagra’s fleet including DC-7’s, DC-8-31’s and 55F’s, as well as purchase orders for five long-range intercontinental McDonnell Douglas DC-8-62 aircraft.

Braniff went broke in 1982. Apparently someone thought it a good idea to start again, under Panagra name. So in 1996 operations were restarted from Fort Lauderdale, FL. using the Boeing 727. Panagra ceased operations (again) in 1999.

Source Document

An interesting story but let me add in a few facts that will tell the rest of the story:

1. By 1926 the Germans had started to fly into almost every South American Country. There was a real concern that they would operate through the Canal Zone and pose even a greater threat to U.S. National Security. The U.S. Government let it be known that they were ready to award mail routes to anyone that could fly Central American and South American routes. NYRBA —New York, Rio, and Buenos Aires— purchased four flying boats and had them in Rio, ready to initiate a service on the East Coast of South America. Richard Hoyt, Juan Trippe and their attorney, “Wild Bill” Donovan were scrambling around trying to get together a consortium to fly these routes, with a bunch of Yale men that were world war one pilots. The route bids went out. Trippe had no aircraft, no crews and bid $2.35/mile. NYRBA had aircraft and crews, but when they went to negotiate landing rights, they ran into trouble with the local governments. Yes, the Secretary of State was a Yale man, as was the Post Master General who awarded the routes to Pan Am.

2. SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Allemán De Transporto Aéreo — Colombian-German Air Transport Corporation) was the first commercial airline in the western hemisphere. It began operations in Colombia on October 19, 1920. It was the product of German businessmen, war surplus airplanes and personnel from the World War I Luftwaffe along with Colombian capital. By the end of 1920 SCADTA had an exclusive airmail contract with the Colombian government. The contract, which lasted eleven years, included the right to print and sell their own SCADTA airmail stamps. Interestingly, it was SCADTA’s aggressive expansion throughout South and Central America during the 1920s that led to an appropriation by the U. S. Congress to provide funds for the Post office to subsidize domestic and foreign air transport expansion in 1925. This was the Kelley Bill, the Air Mail Act of 1925.

3. Pan American Airways secretly owned a major part of SCADTA which it had acquired during the early days of the depression with help from the U. S. Secretary of State. This ownership led to PAA ownership of 65% of AVIANCA which was formed from SCADTA when it was nationalized by the Colombian government of President Dr. Alfonso López in 1934.

Source Document

I wish the best to you in this New Year, and as always take care, be safe, and remember……life is short. Take some time to slow down and enjoy the ride.

Robert Novell

January 09, 2026

Happy New Year – January 1, 2026

Robert Novell — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:32:00 +0000

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January 1, 2026

Good Morning/Evening,

Our best to all of you loyal readers, and visitors, and may the New Year bring each of you the very best that life has to offer both in the air and on the ground.

Regards,

Robert Novell

January 1, 2026

Robert Novell

An Aviation Legend, Gone but not Forgotten – May 22, 2026

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May 22, 2026

Robert “Bob” Hoover

(Promoter/Test Pilot – Enshrined in to the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988)

Robert A (Bob) Hoover

(The annual Living Legends gala at the Beverly Hilton – January 24, 2012)

The Wright Brothers After Kitty Hawk – May 15, 2026

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May 16, 2026

The Wrights

Before, And After, Kitty Hawk

Orville Wright

(August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948)

Wilbur Wright

April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912

Orville and Wilbur

The Quest -From Beginning To End

Huffman Prairie Flying Field

Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc. – Aviation Ads Open a Window to the Past – May 8, 2026

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May 8, 2026

Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc.

Charley and The Wright Brothers – May 1, 2026

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May 1, 2026

Charles “Charley” Taylor

Portal of the Folded Wings

24 Aviation Pioneers are laid to rest in the

Portal of the Folded Wings

Shrine to Aviation

We All know About the Lone Eagle but What About Beryl Markam April 24, 2026

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April 24, 2026

(Little-remembered today, the adventurous Kenya bush pilot outdid her contemporary Amelia Earhart by flying the Atlantic solo the hard way)

Beryl Markham

Aviators of WW II – April 17, 2026

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April 17, 2026

Blaine Mack – P38 Pilot Aleutian Islands

The Honolulu Clipper – April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

The Honolulu Clipper

The Seaplane Designed to Deliver a Nuclear Payload – April 3, 2026

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April 3, 2026

Martin P6M SeaMaster

Strategic Ambitions

Flight Tests

The Goose – Why Did Howard Hughes Keep the Goose? – March 27, 2026

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March 27, 2026

Why Did Howard Hughes

Keep and Protect the Goose

Howard Hughes, Henry Kaiser, and The Goose- March 20, 2026

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March 20, 2026

The HK-1 Hercules

Glenn Odekirk

The Liberty Ship Program

Did You Know? – March 13, 2026

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March 13, 2026

INTERESTING EARLY AMERICAN

AVIATION HISTORY

(Source: Denham S. Scott, North American Aviation Retirees’ Bulletin)

Washington State Apples – Japan and “Upside Down Pangborn” – March 6, 2026

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March 6, 2026

Washington Apples and Japan

Upside Down Pangborn

Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr.

To a Dear Friend Who was an Inspiration to All – February 27, 2026

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February 27, 2027

Night Stalker…The Origin of Stealth Technology – February 20, 2026

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February 20, 2026

Blaine Mack – P38 Pilot
Aleutian Islands