Aviation

One boy and his airplane. Chip is a sixteen year old boy with a Piper J-3 Cub seaplane named Li'l Windy. He knows how to fly. He's been flying with his father for years. But now he is alone and the sky becomes his classroom. Though he does survive, every flight is an adventure, a great learning experience, and excellent preparation for the boy who wants to become a professional pilot. In fact you may wonder why commercial airline pilots are not required to have this kind of background. It's fun, but it's learning the hard way, discovering things as tangible as aerodynamics and as deep as how to live an entire lifetime. If you have a young person who's not all tha ...

Orphaned by the age of 10, Jim Turner was left without a permanent home, bouncing between living with family members in Upstate SC and Transylvania County, NC until he was drafted into the US Army in 1943. He originally volunteered to be a paratrooper but instead found himself on the way to Walker Air Field after graduating parachute rigging school - to join the “Battle of Kansas” in preparation for the new untested B-29 Superfortress. There he became a Hellbird. Then it was off to India, where Jim did triple duty as a parachute rigger, runway inspector and volunteer tail gunner. After surviving a crash in Burma during a mission and almost starving to death, Jim and the rest of the Hellb ...

From the Landplane Preface > ...this Guide attempts to present the essentials of safe and technically sound flight testing to the E-AB pilot community in a practical, easy to understand way. The flight test topics deemed important to E-AB flight testing derive directly from NTSB recommendations and latest FAA guidance. They represent a mixture of test philosophy and how-to-do-it flight test techniques subjects with an overall emphasis on best practices and safe test conduct. From the Landplane and Seaplane Preface > … there are differences in test procedures between landplanes and seaplanes and they deal with their ground and water handling regardless of whether or not the airplanes ...

Flying Escapades- tragic, hair-raising and hilarious flying stories. This book highlights flying experiences that the author has had and those of others that he met on his journey. The stories range from an aircraft getting blown off the runway in North Carolina to a Learjet descending through a snow storm in northern British Columbia, Canada with a flight crew ignoring the minimum altitude required. Another story deals with a tragic crash on a stormy night with a Learjet 35 doing a Medivac mission to an island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. At night and in bad weather, why did the pilots make a simple mistake that cost them and the three nurses on board their lives? Th ...

In this booklet, the author, a U.S. Air Force Cold War veteran, offers interesting color photos of "roundels" (the insignia on an aircraft's wings & fuselage) that display the country of origin...sometimes, in striking national colors... Nowadays, air forces from the Royal Netherlands Air Force to the U.S. Air Force often display subdued roundels (as a form of camouflage)... Here's hoping the reader enjoys the interesting, sometimes colorful, world of military aircraft insignia; they are used by large nations but also other smaller nations like Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia...& many others!

Squadron Leader Jeff West's War Diaries 1941 - 1945 Casualties en masse, barmaids, mateship, alcoholism, culture shock, boredom, illness and a love of aviation… From flying in formation with Sir Douglas Bader, Sir Alan Smith, Air Vice Marshal Johnnie Johnson and Sir Hugh Dundas in the elite RAF Tangmere 616 squadron, running from exploding bombs as the Luftwaffe devastated Malta, to dealing with plane malfunctions and pilot error in the deserts of Sudan and Egypt. Suffering from dysentery one day and a hangover the next, Jeff delivers his escapades combining wit and heart throughout the glaring naive eyes of a young New Zealand pilot thrust into a life of adventure he could only dr ...

This article outlines Joseph Stalin's attempts, from the 1930s until his death, to democratize the government of the Soviet Union. This statement, and the article, will astonish many, and outrage some. In fact my own amazement at the results of the research I'm reporting on led me to write this article. I had suspected for a long time that the Cold War version of Soviet history had serious flaws. Still, I was unprepared for the extent of the falsehoods I had been taught as fact. This story is well known in Russia, where respect for, even admiration of, Stalin is common. Yuri Zhukov, the main Russian historian who sets forth the paradigm of "Stalin as Democrat" and whose works are the mos ...

In the early 20th century, aviation was in its infancy. Military aviation began to take shape. The U.S. Army Signal Corps' "Aeronautical Division" was designated as the first military aviation unit in the U.S. armed forces. With the help of men like the Wright Brothers (of Dayton, Ohio) and aircraft builder, Glenn Curtiss, things began to develop. This is a photographic journey showing airplanes and key personnel of the time (1908-1918). The United States Air Force of today has those early aviators of the U.S. Army to thank for its success and growth.