Description

This issue includes:

Greg Baughen’s unsentimental examination of the RAF’s state of readiness when Neville Chamberlain delivered his declaration that Britain was at war with Germany, in September 1939.  Jean-Christophe Carbonel’s excavation of a 1958 Sud Aviation brochure detailing technical plans for a nuclear-powered “Super-Caravelle” (the original name for France’s early SST projects) with delta wings and canards and Professor Keith Hayward continues his autopsy of Britain’s post-war aeronautical industry with a look at the political birth — and very nearly early death — of the Harrier’s forerunners, the P.1127 and Kestrel.  Matt Bearman’s interweaving of the British and American stories of “laminar flow” research.  American airline historian Jon Proctor shines a spotlight on the career of the Martin 2-0-2 and 4-0-4 “Skyliners” in TWA service; French historian Joël Mesnard chronicles the story of SNCASE’s Voltigeur ground-attack aircraft of the 1950s; and Indonesian historian Sudiro Sumbodo describes how Garuda’s first generation of commercial pilots came to the UK in the 1960s to learn their trade at Air Service Training at Hamble. Australian Liberator specialist Bob Livingstone sets the record straight about the identities of two B-24s which nearly cost American pre-war athletics star and USAAF bombardier Louis Zamperini his life; Argentinian historian Ricardo M. Lezon retraces an RAF de Havilland Mosquito’s record flight to Buenos Aires in 1946; and American historian Bill Cahill describes how USAF F-4 Phantoms intervened off the Cambodia coast when the Khmer Rouge captured a container ship in 1975.  Finally, Ed Wild recalls flying DC-3s abroad for Hunting Surveys Ltd and Sir George White, the grandson of Bristol Aeroplane Company co-founder Stanley White, describes how his grandfather created the world’s first commercially-available pilot’s logbook.