Old Fighter Aircraft

FLUG WERK Fw-190 Replica

Flug Werk might be a company that was building Focke-Wolf replicas. Did not find much information about them.

Curtiss P-40 Warhawk

Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. With two seats, and a full set of dual controls.

Phantom F4EJ

RJNG airport code = JASDF Gifu Air Base

Flying Tigers

Vans RV-6A at Catalina Island

Here's a modern sport plane dressed up like a WW2 fighter. Next we have the real thing.

Curtiss P-40N Kittyhawk

Kittyhawk? I thought it was a Tomhawk. Depends on where you were standing:

P-40 Warhawk was the name the United States Army Air Corps gave the plane, and after June 1941, the USAAF adopted the name for all models, making it the official name in the U.S. for all P-40s. The British Commonwealth and Soviet air forces used the name Tomahawk for models equivalent to the original P-40, P-40B, and P-40C, and the name Kittyhawk for models equivalent to the P-40D and all later variants. - Wikipedia

 

Songshan Monument

The soldiers of the new Songshan monument are lined up and face the double summit of Songshan Mountain.

There were a couple of big battles over the Huitong Bridge, one early in WW2 when the Japanese were trying to get into China via the Burma Road, and one late in the war, when the Allies were pushing the Japanese back. A monument was erected after the war, but then 20-odd years later it was torn down during the "Cultural Revolution". Recently a new one has been erected.

I'm still trying to sort out exactly what happened and where, but I thought this monument was pretty cool.

Marco Polo Bridge Incident

I picked up a copy of the book The Flying Tigers by Sam Kleiner at Costco yesterday. It is very readable, very smooth (like good whiskey).  It starts with some background on Claire Chennault who eventually becomes the head of The Flying Tigers. We follow him to China where he goes to work for the Chinese Air Force.

Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling

His first job is assessing the current state of that Air Force, which is very bad. He delivers this report to Chiang Kai-shek. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. There's a brief overview of the internal politics of China. Chiang's wife, Soong Mei-ling, is force of her own.

Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen gets mentioned. That's another name I haven't heard in a coon's age.

Anyway, the Japanese have been raising hell in China for years, but now we have the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and the war begins in earnest.

Original Marco Polo Bridge, built in 1190

 The name "Marco Polo Bridge" derives from its appearance in Marco Polo's book of travels, where he praised it highly. - Wikipedia

Current Marco Polo Bridge, built in 1698

So the current bridge isn't the one that Marco Polo saw, but it's in the same place, and it's the one where the Chinese and Japanese clashed.

Pics of the Day

Flying Tigers Boeing 747

The Flying Tigers air cargo line was founded by former members of the AVG (American Volunteer Group, aka The Flying Tigers) after WW2. It was absorbed by Fed-Ex in 1988.

WW2 Flying Tigers Curtiss P-40

Pic of the Day

3rd Squadron Hell’s Angels, Flying Tigers over China, photographed in 1942 by AVG pilot Robert T. Smith. (AVG - American Volunteer Group)

The airplanes are Curtiss P-40 Warhawks.

Via Posthip Scott, except he didn't tell me where he got it. When I looked all I found was a bunch of flak about a new paint scheme for some football helmets. I had to do some digging to get any kind of reference. Just to be clear,  I don't give rat's patootie what anybody's football helmet looks like. Effing Google.

WWII Allied Fighter Aircraft

The P-40 Warhawk that was found in Egypt last month got me to wondering about WWII fighter aircraft in general. The P-40 Warhawk was supplanted by the P-51 Mustang, likewise the Hurricane was supplanted by the Spitfire, so I put together a little spreadsheet comparing the specifications of these four aircraft. I just used the specs I found in Wikipedia. They were all similar size and style: single seat, low wing monoplanes with big V-12, liquid cooled engines. They were about 30 feet long, had a wingspan of about 40 feet, and weighed about 3 tons. We built about 15,000 copies of each one, and each aircraft cost about a million dollars (in today's money).

The big difference between the older and newer aircraft was the addition of a supercharger. The supercharger gave the newer planes more power and more altitude. You have to take the performance specifications with a grain of salt. On one other page I looked at about the Hurricane, the performance specifications were all different. The Mustang versus Spitfire performance specs are especially suspect as the Mustang apparently weighed considerably more than the Spitfire, had approximately the same amount of power, yet according to the specs, the Mustang performed as well or better than the Spitfire.

WWII Will Never Die

Shades of TinTin!

This WWII vintage fighter was discovered in Egypt last month. It's been sitting there for nigh on 70 years. It's a P-40 Kittyhawk. Pictures and story here. More pictures here. From Scott.