Flight Journal

THE COMBAT LIFE of Messerschmitt Bf 109E-3 Wk. Nr. 1342 and its pilot Eduard “Edi” Hemmerling were short and ended on July 29, 1940, during the Battle of Britain. Almost five decades later, a Frenchman’s chance encounter on a beach near Calais revealed a wingtip emerging from the sand. This discovery set in motion the amazing identification and restoration of this lost Luftwaffe fighter. Royal Air Force (RAF) combat reports of that fateful day tell us the assailants were Spitfire pilots of 41 Squadron, Terry Webster and George “Ben” Bennions, who were in a deadly dogfight with German 109s in the skies above Dover Harbor, England. In our feature “The Last Combat,” RAF fighter pilot Clive Rowley brings back the dramatic story of that aerial battle its combatants fought long…

In 1988, a Frenchman walking on the beach near Cap Blanc-Nez near Calais, France, discovered a piece of metal sticking out of the sand. There had been a storm and, as sometimes happens, the sand on the beach had shifted, revealing something that had been buried for almost 50 years. It was the wingtip of a crashed World War II fighter aircraft. As the tides ebbed and flowed, most of the wreck of a relatively intact German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter was revealed, with both wings, the landing gear, and parts of the fuselage. The airframe was recovered from the beach and briefly displayed in France. Then later that year, having been acquired by New Zealand warbird operator and pilot Sir Tim Wallis, it was transported to the United Kingdom for…

On January 16, 1991 Nighthawks unleashed their stealth capabilities and Guided Bomb Units (GBUs) on Baghdad and some of the most heavily defended airfields in Iraq. During the “43 Day War,” F-117As of the 415th and 416th Tactical Fighter Squadrons flew nearly 1,300 sorties under the command of Col. Alton Whitley. Col. Whitley flew a lot of the missions and recalls, “These airfields were jammed tight with aircraft, mostly fighter types. Part of the mindset of Iraqis had been brought by the fact that Iran hadn’t been able to penetrate their defenses and bomb the aircraft parked at the airfields. Early in the conflict, we flew a lot of missions against these hardened aircraft shelters with ordnance that did not work [the GBU-10]. We were tasked to go against these targets…

The evening sun was low on the horizon as John Cyrier taxied toward the Commemorative Air Force’s (CAF’s) ramp at San Marcos, Texas on July 28. He had just completed the final leg of a four-stop flight home from AirVenture 2022 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Cyrier pivoted the Central Texas Wing’s P-39Q around to the right, braked to a stop, and cut power to the fighter’s Allison V-1710 V-12 engine. Just after its 11-foot, seven-inch Aeroproducts propeller swung to a stop, he shot both arms through the P-39’s rolled-down cockpit door windows, clenched his fists, and yelled an exultant “Yeeeaaah!” Cyrier had just realized a dream three years in the making, reuniting America’s highest ranking, living ace, Col. Clarence “Bud” Anderson, with a tribute to the airplane he first dubbed “Old Crow.” Before…

Headquartered just over a mile from the often frozen waters of the Niagara River and Lake Erie in Buffalo, New York, Bell Aircraft Company and its founder Larry Bell were known for doing things differently in the late 1930s. In 1937, the company debuted its radically unconventional YFM-1 Airacuda, a twin-engine, pusher-driven design that included a gunner station at the forward end of each engine nacelle to operate the airplane’s twin 37 mm cannons. Conceptualized as a “bomber destroyer” or “convoy fighter,” the heavy, slow Airacuda proved too bizarre for the U.S. Army Air Corps. Just one prototype and 12 production versions of the Allison V-12 powered oddity were built with all scrapped by 1942. But some of the Airacuda’s weirdness spilled over into the DNA of another snake, the P-39 Airacobra. An…

Artic cold invaded Jesse Brown’s cockpit as he desperately looked for a place to land his F4U-4 Corsair in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea, near the Chosin Reservoir. IT WAS EARLY DECEMBER 1950. More than 120,000 Chinese troops had crossed into North Korea and encircled 30,000 troops from the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1st Division, the U.S. Army’s 7th and 3rd Infantry Divisions, and U.N. forces around the reservoir with the goal of annihilating them. Brown was America’s first Black naval aviator and the first to fly combat missions. He and his VF-32 wingman LTJG Tom Hudner had taken off from the aircraft carrier USS Leyte (CV-32) in the Sea of Japan to provide low-level close-air support for the Americans trying to break out of the encirclement. A “golden bullet” fired by Chinese…