The Aviation Historian: Issue 1

EDITOR'S LETTER

THERE I WAS...

MESSERSCHPITTS AT FIVE O'CLOCK!
Yellow noses, crosses, swastikas...but not on Bf 109s. Nick Stroud looks back at a surprise airshow act

THE TRAGEDY OF FLIGHT THREE
Michael O'Leary investigates the TWA DC-3 crash that killed Hollywood film star Carole Lombard

THE FLYING BILLBOARD
What's 378 feet long, has three engines and floats?

SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
EE Lightning vs Lockheed U-2 in 1962: we tell the full story using official declassified documents and the recollections of those who were there - on both sides.

NORTHERN EXPOSURE
Jan Forsgren reveals how Gladiators and Harts fought in the Finnish - Soviet Winter War of 1939-40

AMERICAN CLASSICS
Rare photographs of flying-boats and floatplanes from the Alpha Archive

FLYING THE FURROW
Derek O'Connor charts the creation of an unusual inter-war navigational aid across the Middle East

HEF AND THE BIG BUNNY
High-altitude hedonism with Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire's innovative DC-9 corporate jet

UNDER THE WINDSTOCKING
More rare photographs, this time lesser-known civil inter-war types, from the collection of Philip Jarrett

ONE FURIOUS SUMMER
The story of Capt Peter W. Brooks's Hawker Fury FB.60 ferry-flight from the UK to Pakistan in 1949, told through his own meticulously-kept journal and photographs

WHY WAS THE MERCURY SO LONG-LIVED?
Graham Warner relates why Bristol's 1920s-vintage Mercury engine enjoyed such a long career

RYAN AND THE TRIANGULAR PTERODACTYLS
Doug Moore describes how the genius of Francis Rogallo led to the birth of "the craziest kite in the sky"

OUT OF THE BLUE
How Papa Smurf saved the T-45 Goshawk, by Mick Oakey

TO BELFAST VIA CALCUTTA
Guy Warner takes a look at the experimental Short Calcutta service operated between Liverpool and Belfast in 1928

BOOK REVIEWS

LOST & FOUND

FROM PENTHOUSE TO WORKHOUSE
Jonathan Pote recalls an encounter with a Boeing 307 Stratoliner in Laos in the mid-1960s

OFF THE BEATEN TRACK