World War II

For most people, a 100th birthday celebration might include a gathering of friends and family, some music, and maybe a slice or two of cake. Tom Rice took things a little further. Rice, who served as a paratrooper in World War II, celebrated passing the century mark by jumping from the Commemorative Air Force’s C-53D […]

Each July, the WWII Airborne Demonstration Team (ADT) conducts its annual Summer Jump School in Frederick, Oklahoma, at the site of the former WWII Frederick Army Air Field (FAAF). ADT has restored the sole remaining massive 79-year-old hangar where they house their Douglas C-47 and C-49, and train students who come to attend the 8-day […]

This spring, in Xenia, Ohio, a very special mission is planned to honor and celebrate the centennial birthday of Jim “Pee Wee” Martin. The Inland Empire Wing of the Commemorative Air Force in Riverside, California, has committed to flying its C-53D, D-Day Doll, to Xenia for the event on April 23 to 25, 2021, joined […]

First flown on December 17, 1935, the Douglas DC-3, an iteration of the DC-1 and DC-2, married reliability with performance and comfort in a way no other airplane had before. So much greater than the sum of its parts, an apt description for an airplane that has earned the right to be called “timeless” more […]

To honor and to serve: a consortium of aviation organizations came together to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, with a glorious parade of historic warbirds over Washington, DC-area skies on September 24, 2020. We take you behind the scenes as the crews fly practice runs over the Virginia countryside—and […]

World War II ended in a series of events marked by two prominent milestones in 1945—the end of the war in Europe in May, and the closing of the war in the Pacific in August and September, with the final conclusion of the war marked by the signing of the instrument of surrender of the […]

Miss Montana, a restored Douglas C-47A/DC-3C that was used in aerial firefighting after World War II, returned to Helena, Montana, on Monday, August 5, 2019, to commemorate a mission in which 12 of 15 smokejumpers, plus one person on the ground, lost their lives fighting the Mann Gulch Fire following their drop from the airplane. […]

Bringing together the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force in 2018 with the 75th anniversary of its first missions in 1944, the Silver Spitfire launched on August 5, 2019, on its round-the-world journey from Goodwood Aerodrome in southern England. The Silver Spitfire, MJ271, was one of the original aircraft built in 1943 in Castle […]

The event took years to plan, months to prepare, weeks to position and practice—and one day to execute. On the early evening of June 5, 2019, as clouds brooded over the Normandy countryside, a formation of Douglas C-47s and other DC-3 variants delivered on the mission to re-create a critical paratrooper drop commemorating the 75th […]

“When the kids came over in 1944, they didn’t have GPS…they didn’t have 500 hours of time in the cockpit between them,” says Doug Rozendaal, pilot of That’s All Brother, a Douglas C-47 joining the 2019 D-Day Squadron in an epic trip across the Atlantic Ocean this week. He considers his crew very fortunate: Not […]