Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2020 i Air & Space

As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, I’ve been thinking about the classic World War II stories of triumph that we all know. We have learned the stories of the pilots and paratroopers who were the first to cross the English Channel on D-Day, of the perilous mission to Tokyo flown by Jimmy Doolittle and his Raiders, and of the other aviators and aircraft that helped secure Allied victory. Stories like these—of unique dilemmas, unconventional solutions, and ultimate success—are seen over and over again in the chronicles of aviation and spaceflight. And there is a good reason to tell them: They are a vital part of the history that shaped the world we live in today. But if we stop there and tell only…

On the eve of the Battle of Midway, Torpedo Squadron Eight’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, steeled his men for battle with these prophetic words: “If there is only one plane left to make the final run-in, I want that man to go in and get a hit.” The next day, June 4, 1942, he led the squadron’s 15 Douglas TBD Devastators in a desperate attack against the Japanese fleet. All were shot down; only one man survived. Soon after the battle, the torpedo bombers were withdrawn from frontline service and, of the 129 Devastators built, none survive today except for a few wrecks at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But, in 2019, San Diego’s USS Midway Museum acquired the next best thing: the Devastator replica used in filming…

A PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP to support America’s return to the moon took a huge step forward in January, when it was announced that the Air Force Research Laboratory and Blue Origin are developing a new test facility for the Blue Origin BE-7 lunar lander engine at the AFRL rocket division at Edwards Air Force Base. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has agreed to provide “capital improvements” to the 1-42 test site, which is capable of simulating conditions in the vacuum of space and the upper atmosphere. Planned work includes adding liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant capabilities to the facility. The BE-7 engine is a new, high-performance, 10,000 pound-thrust, dual-expander cycle engine that will power the Human Landing System that Blue Origin is developing for NASA’s…

CROWDS FILLED THE SIDEWALK in January 1976, peering through the building’s glass walls and doors in hopes of glimpsing the treasures within. And even though the Smithsonian’s new National Air and Space Museum wouldn’t officially open until July 1, former astronaut and Museum director Michael Collins made a decision. He would open the Independence Avenue doors from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day, and allow visitors to approach a temporary barrier within the Museum lobby and look around. The intense curiosity was sparked, in part, by two artists, each working high on scaffolding, painting murals of gigantic proportions. One depicted aviation, the other, space. The murals weren’t painted directly onto the Museum’s walls, but onto Belgian linen bonded to the wall’s surface—something that came in handy just recently, when…

CARL L. NORDEN’S bombsight calculated a bomb’s drop point based on the delivery aircraft’s speed, range to target, wind, and other variables, causing it to be touted during World War II (among those with the security clearance to know of it) as a miracle device that would destroy targets with pickel-barrel accuracy from 20,000 feet. The U.S. military spent $1.1 billion in 1940s dollars to build 90,000 Nordens, each one a 50-pound analog computer comprising 2,000 intricately joined parts including gyros, motors, gears, mirrors, and levers. If their aircraft were fatally hit, bombardiers were under orders to destroy the secret machine rather than allow it to be captured. While showing great promise in daylight testing, in combat, it failed to produce notably better results than similar devices fielded by other…

Twin Mustang Fan Thank you for putting the XP-82 on the cover, and for a great story about Tom Reilly. He hangars the airplane at the museum where I volunteer (as a board member) in Titusville, Florida. We took the airplane up as part of a group over Kennedy Space Center—lots of fun! DENNIS R. JENKINS via email Mistaken Identity In your article “Omaha to Salt Lake City Without GPS” (Feb./Mar. 2020), a photograph on page 32 incorrectly refers to a bottle of Gentleman Jack as bourbon. It is not bourbon. It is Tennessee whiskey. RICHARD FIEDLER Seymour, Tennessee Combat Veteran Thanks for your article “Last of the Long-distance Escorts” (Feb./Mar. 2020) on an oft-overlooked and very remarkable fighter airplane, the F-82 (P-82) T w i n M u s…

THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM on the National Mall is undergoing an extensive renovation, and half of the Museum is now closed to visitors. During the next few years, all of the Museum’s 23 galleries will be renewed. To safeguard artifacts during construction, the Museum staff is moving more than 5,200 aircraft, spacecraft, and other items to a new storage facility at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia. There’s still plenty to see; multiple galleries remain open, and visitors can still marvel over “first” and “only” iconic aircraft and spacecraft, including the 1903 Wright Flyer; the Spirit of St. Louis; and Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit. What can’t be seen is the hard work happening every day to move the Museum’s precious aeronautical heritage, but here are a few…

ON THE GUSTY AFTERNOON of October 20, 1825, a lone balloonist became the first woman to fly in America. Floating over Wall Street’s Coffee House Slip and the one-story villages of Brooklyn, her hydrogen-gas balloon resembled a bobbing top hat to the thousands assembled as it sailed through, in one reporter’s words, “the liquid regions of the sky.” Among the upward-looking throng was an anxious President John Quincy Adams, who days later wrote a sonnet about the flight. Over the next few years, the press covered three successful ascents and five failed attempts by the balloonist who called herself “Madame Johnson.” There was also a report of a flight over the Mississippi in New Orleans. Interviewed by journalists, Johnson claimed to have flown 32 times from the age of 12.…

IT ISN’T A SMILE. It is more a predator’s sneer. Razor teeth, wagging tongue, and a 300-yard stare from black, dead eyes, focused at the spot where the warplane’s guns converge. The airplane nose art presented the face of aggression, a bit of psychological warfare intended to intimidate, created with a few ounces of paint slathered on aluminum. World War II’s legendary American Volunteer Group, the “Flying Tigers,” made the shark mouth famous, but they weren’t the first to paint it on airplanes. During World War I, a few German pilots painted eyes and a closed-mouth frown on their Roland C.II reconnaissance aircraft. They called their fat-bellied Roland biplanes Walfische (Whales). The nose art was jocular and seemed appropriate for such tubby machines. It appeared to carry an expression more…

THE NUMBER OF AUTOMOBILES produced annually in the United States quadrupled between 1946 and 1955. And with this newfound ease of travel, Americans took to the roads, where tourist attractions, motels, gas stations, diners, and other oddities vied for their attention and their wallets. Photographer and architectural critic John Margolies spent more than 40 years chronicling the quirky ingenuity of roadside America. Margolies feared—correctly, as it would turn out—that these structures wouldn’t survive changing trends, such as the embrace of functional modernist architecture. The emergence of the interstate highway system would ultimately put most establishments along U.S. roads out of business. But thanks to Margolies, we have thousands of images, with aviation and space travel among the popular themes. Clockwise from above: Hungry travelers passing through Byron, Georgia could enjoy…

The Hubble Space Telescope is the pride of NASA, dazzling the world with images of deep space that have become as iconic as the most famous photographs taken on Earth. To mark the telescope’s 30th year in orbit, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. will host on April 24 a public event presenting astronauts, engineers, and scientists who have contributed to the space telescope’s success. You can watch part of the event on Facebook and on the Museum’s website, airandspace.si.edu. Although Hubble isn’t the first telescope sent into space, it is the largest and the most sophisticated. It can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arcseconds, which, according to NASA, “is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo that are less than…

The U.S. Navy is installing specialized mini-control centers for drones on its aircraft carriers as they go through overhauls and maintenance. At a recent conference, Captain Chuck Ehnes, the Navy’s in-service aircraft carrier program manager, said the Unmanned Aviation Warfare Centers are being built into Nimitz- and Ford-class carriers to operate Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray unmanned aerial tanker and other drones that the Navy might operate from its aircraft carriers in the near future. “Because of the importance of drones and the appetite for more and more of them—and because the ability to control them is changing so quickly—you want a dedicated center so you can condense and streamline the fast-emerging technology,” says Kris Osborn, a military analyst who writes online for The National Interest. The Navy intends to procure eight…

TSUKI NO ISHI WA DOKO DESU KA? That’s a question I heard, and answered, hundreds of times every day. The year was 1970. I was one of 56 young Japanese-speaking American guides who’d been hired to staff the U.S. Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. It was the first World’s Fair to be held in that country, and 78 nations contributed exhibits intended to exemplify the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” Ever since Neil Armstrong had taken that giant leap for mankind in the previous summer, the Japanese public had become passionate about space travel. More than anything, they wanted to see a genuine piece of the lunar surface. They’d willingly tolerate waiting in line for three hours to enter our doors, so long as they could…

It will be the world’s largest digital camera. It will weigh in at three tons and be the size of an SUV. The telescope that surrounds it would cover a tennis court. Its 3.2 billion-pixel array will produce a new picture of the whole southern sky every three nights, with unprecedented detail, over and over, for years on end. We’re accustomed to telescopes getting bigger and better, viewing ever fainter and more distant objects at increasingly higher magnification. The Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain in California, the world’s largest mirror for much of the last century, begat Keck, twins that took over as largest with 10-meter mirrors in the 1990s. Keck begat the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, the current record holder with an 11.9-meter effective aperture. Designers of the…

THE FUTURE OF FIGHTER AIRCRAFT production is showcased in Building 27A at the sprawling Boeing manufacturing facility in St. Louis. Complex components that once were screwed and riveted together from five pieces of metal are now monolithic units machined out of single billets of titanium. Thousands of holes that previously had been drilled laboriously by union workers are now punched out with matchless precision by a robot. Even as a pair of massive wings takes shape, the building is eerily quiet. Thanks to automation, the wings are assembled by 20 laborers rather than the 80 required in the past. But what’s really strange about the scene under way in this St. Louis factory is that these advanced manufacturing techniques are being applied to an airplane whose original design dates back…

JOE SCHEIL IS A NUMBERS GUY. When he sees an interesting airplane, he looks for its serial number in an online database or published reference work to learn what he can about it. He adds the information he finds to one of several Excel spreadsheets he has created with details on hundreds of airplanes organized by their serial numbers. In 2017, while reading an article in the Experimental Aircraft Association’s magazine Warbirds of America, Scheil came across a photo of a famous World War II Piper L-4 Grasshopper, serial number 43-30426, and decided to find out more. The article was about Charles Carpenter, an L-4 pilot who became known as “Bazooka Charlie” for his exploits against German tanks. The Grasshopper—a Piper Cub as a civilian—was flown during the war as…