World War II

Early this year my son, who was screening a series of classic films for friends, put on the 1981 Spielberg pulse-pounder Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the year he was born and, therefore, stood to him, in terms of the history of film and the decline of taste, as Casablanca does […]

July 22, 1921: The Douglas Aircraft Co. incorporates, with its main base in Santa Monica, California, in an old movie studio. April 1936: The first Douglas Sleeper Transport is delivered to American Airlines. 1943: The 2,000th C-47 rolls out of the production hangar at Long Beach. 1944: More than 100 C-47s fill the skies over […]

Airshow great Stan Segalla, best known for his comedy routine as “The Flying Farmer” at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Upstate New York and other airshows around the Northeast, has died at 91. A World War II vet, Segalla was a star attraction at Rhinebeck for many years before retiring for good in 2008. His […]

Eric Melrose Brown, one of the most decorated pilots of all time, died last week at age 97. Brown joined the Fleet Air Arm of the British navy in 1940 and, in an era when aviation was developing rapidly for military use, he beat the odds on many occasions, surviving 11 airplane crashes. During his […]

April may have been the cruelest month in T. S. Eliot’s London, but here in Los Angeles, it’s September. On the 3rd, consequently, my wife, Nancy, and I decamped for Cape Cod. Not in my airplane. For one thing, Nancy has pretty much turned against flying. I suppose that if the “Big One” — the […]

_Enola Gay. FIFI. The Great Artiste. Kee Bird. The Big Stink. _ It was an airplane dubbed “Superfortress.” Yet many of the most famous Boeing B-29 bombers that plied the skies during the latter days of World War II carried strangely meek-sounding individual names. Perhaps that’s of benefit to our collective psyche since the airplanes […]