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Warbird Obsession
It's an addiction. Admitting you have it is the first step.
By Rebecca Maksel
airspacemag.com, December 03, 2008
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“If one had any sense or a desire to stay alive, you didn’t try and mix with a Zero, at any costs,” Squadron Leader Robert W. Foster, RAF told James Busha, who wrote the text of The High Battleground. In 1937, the Japanese Navy requested an airplane with a maximum speed of more than 310 miles per hour at an altitude of 13,000 feet. The fighter also had to be able to climb 9,800 feet in under three and a half minutes, stay airborne for about one and a half hours, and operate from a carrier deck. (All this with an engine in the 1,000-horsepower class.) “Just glancing at the requirements made me gloomy,” aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi later recalled. But Horikoshi’s Zero remains the fastest fighter ever powered by a 1,000-horsepower air-cooled engine, and was rated by the U.S. Army Air Forces as superior to the P-38, P-39, P-40, P-51, F4F, and F4U—the best U.S. fighters of the day. The Zero pictured here is part of the Commemorative Air Force, based in Pacific Coast, California.
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Comments
Nice photo and info about the P38. My Mother's youngest brother was a photographer in the US Army, stationed in Australia during WWII. He was killed along with the other crew while on a recon mission over New Guinea in a P38 in late 1942. The wreckage was not found until 1961 and the remains, identified by dog-tags, are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Posted by R. C. Rogers on December 22,2008 | 11:44AM
Saw a Spitfire fly in Owls Head ,Maine in the late 1970s. I heard the owners last name was Rockefeller,and it was WONDERFUL to HEAR that engine going at "full chat" at about 500 ft with a pilot who was driving it like he stole it! I still have the photos of that great plane from that great day on my desk, 30 years after... The magic of that day has allowed the smells,sounds, and SIGHTs to remain with me. It was a very good day!
Posted by Brian Beauregard on August 31,2009 | 06:21PM