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Cannon vs. Machine Guns
One of the many interesting presentations at the Joint Fighter Conference held at NAS Patuxent River, MD in October 1944 concerned the Navy’s upcoming transition from the .50-calibre machine gun to the...
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Halcyon Days V
Once upon a time, when I was a preteen, I lived with my mother and stepfather in the Philippine Islands. He was assigned as the Assistant Public Works Officer at Naval Air Station Sangley Point, which...
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The First Flight of Vought's XF7U-1 Cutlass
One of the discrepancies that I couldn't resolve before my F7U-1 monograph went to press was the frequently reported first flight date of 29 September 1948 versus a contemporaneous mention of a short...
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Texaco
One of the problems with basing jet airplanes on aircraft carriers was their lack of endurance. Roughly speaking, compared to a propeller-driven airplane a jet launched carrying more than twice as much...
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F7U-3 Cutlass Survivors
Although much maligned, the F7U Cutlass racked up a number of firsts or close seconds for Navy jet fighter airplanes. If Westinghouse had delivered engines with the thrust and fuel consumption that...
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Texaco Redux
Kim Simmelink left a comment on my original Texaco post (http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/10/texaco.html) asking about a McDonnell refueling pod. As it turns out, that was a Beech pod but more about...
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X-47B Update
For some reason, I put my post about the successful landing of the X-47B aboard a carrier at sea over on my modeling blog, http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2013/07/well-that-was-special.htmlMy other...
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Crossing the Line
For some reason, I had missed getting this small book until this past week, perhaps because the title, Crossing the Line: A BlueJacket's Odyssey in World War II, sounded like a seaman's memoir about...
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F-35C: So far, so good
In late 2011, I wrote about the F-35C's problems with arresting landings as part of a summary history of the practice. See http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2011/12/brief-history-of-tailhook-design.htmlThe...
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Composite Squadrons and Detachments
I've mentioned composite squadrons and detachments before. See http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2012/12/hellcats-on-cves.html for a summary description of WW II composite squadrons and...
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Finding the Way Home
Anybody can find their way nowadays with GPS, even back to a carrier far at sea, never having caught sight of land. It took considerably more skill in World War II, although the naval aviator was...
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The A-12 Program is History
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-navy-jet-suit-20140125,0,4137919.story#axzz2ryLV5DCeFor my previous posts on the tortuous path of the settlement through the courts and...
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Who's Your Daddy?
The amount of organization information displayed on U.S. Navy carrier aircraft underwent some interesting changes between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. For example, the F2H-2 Banshee in the early...
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Navy Aircraft Designation Suffixes Redux
While in the process of preparing a set of notes and illustrations about the F4U-4 configuration changes, I was somewhat surprised to find that the cannon-armed variant was designated both F4U-4B, the...
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CVS Carrier Self Defense
In the mid-1950s, several Essex-class carriers were repurposed from attack to antisubmarine warfare and redesignated CVS. Although the air groups primarily consisted of ASW and AEW (Airborne Early...
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Once Upon a Time
I lived on NAS Sangley Point, Phillipine Islands, as a boy in the mid 1950s (my stepfather was the assistant Public Works Officer there). One anecdote I heard was about a station SNJ that was taken up...
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Black Knights Rule!
Angelo Romano has produced some excellent naval aviation monographs. I mentioned other examples here: http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2014/02/whos-your-daddy.htmlAngelo has a fantastic (and incredibly...
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27 Charlie
Hancock Deploying, 2 August 1969 William T. LarkinsSteve Govus was on the flight deck of Hancock during its 1969/1970 deployment to the waters off Vietnam. Not only that, but he took pictures. For his...
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