Table of contents for January - February 2023 in 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…

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…

General Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, was not happy. First-line U.S. fighters had been in South East Asia in small numbers since 1960. By mid-1964, more fighters began rotating through bases in South Vietnam and Thailand as a show of force. Reconnaissance missions with a pair of fighters as escorts, known as “armed recce,” were being flown into Laos and Vietnam, but they were severely restricted in their operations. The fighters escorting the reconnaissance aircraft could attack enemy positions only if they were first fired upon. The politicians were being cautious. By January 1965, there had been several “protective reactions,” and even a few fragged (planned) missions, but nothing of any real scope. In fact, many of the preplanned missions had failed to find their targets in…

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…

“AT THE END OF THE WAR, there was an interview with a senior German U-boat commander asking why they pulled their submarines from the Atlantic coast in 1943,” American Airlines Boeing 737 captain Sean Neal recalls. “His reply was, ‘It was because of those damn little red and yellow airplanes!’” The little red and yellow airplanes the U-boat skipper was referring to were the general aviation aircraft pressed into service by the newly formed Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in 1942 to report, deter, and disrupt the operations of German submarines, which had begun to devastate merchant vessels along the East Coast that January. Civilian-liveried types, including the Stinson 10, Grumman Widgeon, Stinson Reliant, Sikorsky S-39, and Fairchild 24 had CAP markings applied, were armed and went to war for 18…

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…

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”…

IF YOU WERE AT THE 2022 EAA AIRVENTURE Oshkosh airshow, you may have had the chance to see something truly unique early one morning: the rooster crowing to wake you was replaced with the magical rumble of two F7F Tigercats and four P-51 Mustangs, a sortie put together by Lewis Air Legends, Breitling, and AOPA. At 5:15 am, the boots of all six pilots hit the deck of Warbird Alley to brief before the flight at sunrise. Owner of Lewis Air Legends, Rod Lewis, was to lead the sortie in the silver Tigercat “La Patrona” with guest Drew Reggie alongside the blue Tigercat “Here Kitty, Kitty!” piloted by aviator Stew Dawson with guest Thierry Prissert, president of Breitling USA. The four-ship of P-51 Mustangs consisted of aviators Larry “Lumpy” Lumpkin in…