The Newsletter of the War Eagles Air Museum Editorial F

1 www.war-eagles-air-museum.com

Editorial F ortunately for aviation enthusi-

asts, the global inventory of war-birds includes flying examples of

many of the world’s most significant combat aircraft. There are exceptions, of course. For example, pending restoration of the Commemorative Air Force’s B-29 Fifi, there is currently no airworthy Boe-ing Superfortress. Many of the more ob-scure German and Japanese aircraft types used in World War II do not exist at all. England, whose aircraft industry over the years has built some of the most interest-ing aircraft ever to fly, has a regrettable habit of cutting these historic treasures up for scrap. Thus it is very exciting news that, after a Herculean worldwide fund-raising and restoration effort, there is to-day a flying example of perhaps the most famous post-War British aircraft of all—the Avro Vulcan.

Development of the Vulcan began in 1947 at the A.V. Roe (Avro) factory, near Manchester, England. The Air Ministry’s specification called for a heavy, high-alti-tude, high-speed, long-range bomber to serve as Britain’s airborne nuclear deter-rent. In case Avro’s radical delta-wing de-sign failed, the Ministry at the same time contracted with the Vickers-Armstrong and Handley Page aircraft companies to develop “insurance bombers.” In the end, the Royal Air Force (RAF) put all three aircraft into service as the world-famous “V-bomber” force—the Vickers Valiant, Handley Page Victor and Avro Vulcan.

Contents Editorial......................................1 Featured Aircraft ........................1 From the Director.......................2 Historical Perspectives ..............5 Tailspins with Parker..................6 Membership Application ............7

Featured Aircraft

H ow does one decide how much influence an aircraft design has on other aircraft? When you re-

duce an aircraft to its most basic compo-nents—lifting surfaces, control system, powerplant (unless it’s a glider) and a place for the crew to work—then all air-craft are fundamentally identical. But it is indisputable that some aeronautical inno-vations directly influenced the course of aviation development worldwide. The jet engine is one example of such an ad-vance. Another is the swept wing.

The Newsletter of the War Eagles Air Museum

Fourth Quarter (Oct - Dec) 2008

Volume 21, Number 4

The Soviet Union built more than 13,100 Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-15s, and many more were made under license by Czechoslovakia, Poland and China. In this photo from June 1989, the late John MacGuire pilots his two-seater ex-Polish Air Force MiG-15UTI Mid-get over the southern New Mexico desert near the new War Eagles Air Museum.

Featured Aircraft (Continued on Page 2) Editorial (Continued on Page 8)


From the Director

W ith autumn underway, days are cooler, the winds have di-minished and the nights are

really pleasant here in the Chihuahuan Desert. So the old excuses of “It’s too hot to volunteer at the Museum” or “It’s too windy to volunteer,” while they may be valid at certain times of the year, most definitely do not hold true now. Fall and winter are probably the best seasons in the area, and there is no better time for you to come out and spend some quality volunteer time with us.

Another reason for you to come out is that it seems things are always busiest for us during the last three months of the year. The big RV Fly-In in early October should draw more than 100 aircraft from around the country, and up to 400 people. We can use volunteers to staff the regis-tration table, meet and greet visitors, con-duct informal tours, guide traffic, give di-rections, answer questions about the Mu-seum and the area, and so on. The Chili Cookoff follows close behind the Fly-In, and we can always use judges in addition to the many other areas in which volun-teers can help out. No culinary experi-ence is required—just a desire to have a good time and sample some great chili (and maybe some not-so-great chili!). Be sure to bring your own antacid tablets.

Feel free to come to the Museum any Thursday at noon for our weekly volun-teer appreciation lunch. And thanks very much for your dedication and hard work. We really appreciate it! Skip Trammell

Plane Talk—The Newsletter of the War Eagles Air Museum Fourth Quarter 2008

Plane Talk Published quarterly by:

War Eagles Air Museum 8012 Airport Road Santa Teresa, New Mexico 88008 (575) 589-2000

Author/Editor: Terry Sunday Chief Nitpicker: Frank Harrison Final Proofreader: Kathy Sunday

[email protected]

Practical demonstrations of both of these innovations, as well as many oth-ers, first took place in Nazi Germany dur-ing the Third Reich. Considering condi-tions in the Reich late in World War II, it is remarkable that German scientists and engineers accomplished so much. Politi-cal alliances morphed often, with very real risks of arrest, imprisonment and death to those in the wrong place at the wrong time. Demented megalomaniacal Führer Adolf Hitler micro-managed Ger-man industry and military operations with bizarre directives, impossible de-mands and ever-changing priorities. Non-stop Allied bombing forced factories to disperse, and caused debilitating short-ages of fuel, metals and other critical re-sources. Yet dedicated German designers still developed and fielded innovative, groundbreaking technological triumphs such as the twin-jet, swept-wing Messer-schmitt Me.262 Schwalbe (Swallow), the tail-less, rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me.163B Komet interceptor and the ex-traordinary Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (V-2) long-range ballistic missile.

In the final days of the War, U.S. Ar-my Air Corps General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold set up a team of scientists called the “Scientific Advisory Group,” led by expatriate Hungarian aerodynamicist Dr. Theodore von Kármán of the California Institute of Technology, to examine cap-tured German military technology. One result of the team’s evaluation was al-most immediate. The great advantages of swept wings, based on German wind tun-nel and flight test data, led Boeing Air-craft Company in 1945 to put a swept wing on its existing straight-wing B-47 bomber design, which had been under development since 1943. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

The Soviet Union also took advan-tage of German technology. In the ruins of the Reichsluftministerium (German Air Ministry) in Berlin, the Red Army found a complete set of plans for the Ta.183, an advanced swept-wing turbojet fighter de-signed by Dipl. Ing. (Diploma Engineer) Kurt Tank (the “Ta” prefix of the aircraft designation comes from his last name)

Featured Aircraft (Continued from page 1)

and aerodynamicist Dipl. Ing. Hans Mul-thopp of Focke Wulf Flugzeugbau (Focke Wulf Aircraft Company). The Ta.183 had been scheduled for its first flight in June 1945 and for full production by Oc-tober. None was ever actually built. If it had been available in quantity, the Ta.183 could have turned the tide of the War for Germany, at least temporarily.

What the Soviet Union did with its windfall is disputed. Some modern Rus-sian aviation historians hold that the Ta.183 did not influence Soviet aircraft design at all. But the War-ravaged Soviet aircraft industry did everything possible to get back on its feet. For instance, Tu-polev’s Tu-4 Bull bomber was a copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, suppos-edly even including patched bullet holes (the Soviets had reverse-engineered three B-29s that had made emergency landings in Siberia during World War II). Most historians thus believe that some of the technology from the unbuilt Ta.183 later emerged in one of the best-known and most widely used aircraft of the Cold War—the Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-15.

Featured Aircraft (Continued on page 3)

This rendering, used without permission from www.luft46.com, depicts Focke Wulf’s Ta.183 in a camouflage paint scheme as it might have appeared if it had gone into pro-duction before World War II ended.


cated duct passed on both sides of the cock-pit. The MiG-15’s hori-zontal stabilizer was midway up the vertical tail, not at the top, and the main landing gear retracted into the wing instead of the fuselage. The wings of the two aircraft were very simi-lar. Even if the Soviets did not really copy the Ta.183 (as they did the B-29), the MiG-15 ob-viously benefited from the Germans’ work.

The first produc-tion MiG-15 flew on December 31, 1948, and the new jet entered service with the VVS (Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily, or Soviet Air Force) the next year. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) assigned it the report-ing name Fagot, with the “F” meaning “fight-er” and the two sylla-bles denoting jet pow-er. Early production examples had some un-pleasant handling vi-ces, such as a tendency to roll that ground crews had to laborious-ly correct by manually bending trim tabs. Most of the vices went away with the MiG-15bis1 variant, which also had an upgraded Klimov VK-1 en-gine (essentially an improved Nene).

The origins of the 50-year-long Cold War are too complex to cover here. But, to grossly oversimplify, Soviet leaders after World War II, still reeling from Hit-ler’s brutal attacks that had killed mil-lions of Soviet citizens, harbored a real (to them) fear of a similar U.S. strike, but with nuclear weapons rather than con-

Set up in Moscow in December 1939 by aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan, the A. I. Mikoyan OKB (Opytnoe Konstruc-torskoe Byuro, or Experimental Design Bureau) became OKB MiG in 1942 when aeronautical engineer Mikhail Gurevich joined the company, which added his ini-tial to its name (the small “i” is the Rus-sian word “and”). Over the years, OKB MiG has produced some of the world’s best and most significant aircraft.

Some sources report that OKB MiG built six Ta.183s from the German plans soon after the War, using 5,100-pound-thrust British Rolls-Royce RB-41 Nene centrifugal-flow turbojet engines rather than the lower-thrust axial-flow Junkers Jumo 004B or Heinkel HeS-011 turbojets in the original design. First flight report-edly was in June 1947. Flight tests soon revealed several aerodynamic problems. OKB MiG made some design changes to fix these problems, and the resulting air-craft, designated I-310 but actually the prototype MiG-15, first flew on Decem-ber 30, 1947, in the skilled hands of test pilot Viktor N. Yuganov. Production de-liveries started five months later.

Regardless of whether or not the So-viet Union really built Ta.183s, there are many similarities, and also some key dif-ferences, between Tank’s design and the MiG-15. For example, the Ta.183’s cock-pit was placed entirely above the engine air intake duct, while the MiG-15’s bifur-

Featured Aircraft (Continued from page 2)

Fourth Quarter 2008 Plane Talk—The Newsletter of the War Eagles Air Museum

ventional bombs. Thus, the main mission of the VVS’s MiG-15 units was to shoot down invading American bombers. To do this, the diminutive jets had a heavy arm-ament package of three cannons, two of 23mm calibre and one 37mm, that had a tremendous destructive punch. But their low rates of fire and slow muzzle veloci-ties made them less effective against the agile American and British fighters that the MiG-15 eventually faced in combat.

When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, it quickly became much more than a border dispute between communist

Featured Aircraft (Continued on page 4)

Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-15bis General Characteristics

Powerplant One 5,950-pound-stat-ic-thrust Klimov VK-1 turbojet

Cruise Speed 525 miles per hour

Maximum Speed 650 miles per hour

Service Ceiling ~50,000 feet

Length 33 feet 4 inches

Wingspan 33 feet 3 inches

Range ~1,250 miles

Weight (empty) 8,115 pounds

Weight (maximum) 12,300 pounds

1 The suffix “bis” means “repeat” in Old Latin. Interesting-ly, the same suffix is sometimes used today in computer modem protocol standards—a protocol designation ending with “bis” is the second version of that protocol.

1 The suffix “bis” means “repeat” in Old Latin. Interesting-ly, the same suffix is sometimes used today in computer modem protocol standards—a protocol designation ending with “bis” is the second version of that protocol.



orbit the earth, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, was killed, along with his co-pilot Vladi-mir Seregin, in a crash in bad weather on March 27, 1968.

War Eagles Air Museum has on dis-play two examples of this early Soviet fighter—a “standard” MiG-15bis Fagot and a MiG-15UTI Midget, the latter with its cockpit canopy open and a ladder set up so that you can see inside. Note the DYMO label-maker tapes all over the in-strument panel and on the switches, lev-ers and controls. This aircraft was built in Poland, and thus had Polish markings and placards when Museum founder John MacGuire acquired it. Early-day volun-teers and friends of the nascent Museum, armed with a general knowledge of aero-nautics and a Polish-English dictionary, laboriously translated all of the markings into English and glued on the tape labels.

John MacGuire purchased several Polish-built MiGs, a mixture of one- and two-seaters, from a private owner in Lon-don in 1988—when the Museum was just a gleam in his eye. A restoration facility in Reno, Nevada, made some of the air-craft flyable, complete with registrations and airworthiness certificates, and put the others in static display condition. Of the four Fagots and one Midget that Mac-Guire purchased, only the Midget ever flew after arrival in the U.S., as seen in the 1989 photograph on Page 1.

North Korea and democratic South Kor-ea. In fact, it became a “proxy war” in-volving the three major global powers of the day (the U.S., the Soviet Union and the Peoples’ Republic of China). In the frigid air high over the Korean peninsula, American Lockheed F-80 Shooting Stars, Republic F-84 Thunderjets and British Gloster Meteors of the Royal Australian Air Force, met up with the MiG-15 for the first time. It was an eye-opening ex-perience. The tiny Soviet fighter left the Western aircraft in the dust.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union both claimed victory in the world’s first jet-vs.-jet aerial dogfight on November 8, 1950. Either an F-80 downed a MiG-15, or a MiG-15 shot down an F-80, or no-body shot down anybody. Records dis-agree, and there are strong arguments for all viewpoints. But there is little dis-agreement that the MiG-15 outperformed American and British aircraft early in the war, and the mismatch was not corrected until North American F-86 Sabre jets be-gan arriving in Korea in December 1950.

The capabilities of the MiG-15 and F-86 reflected the different missions for which each was designed. The Soviet air-craft had a higher rate of climb, better high-altitude performance and heavier ar-mament, the better to intercept and shoot down attacking bombers. Intended as an

Featured Aircraft (Continued from page 3) air-superiority fighter, the F-86 was a bit more maneuverable than the Mig-15, in general, and it performed far better at low altitudes. Its six reliable Browning .50-calibre machine guns gave it a good punch in dogfights.

By the end of the War, American pilots had earned a kill ratio as high as 8 to 1 against their communist adver-saries. While the air-craft of the two sides were amazingly well-matched, the Ameri-cans were much better trained. They also had longer combat assignments, which gave them more experience than the North Korean and Chinese pilots, who rotated in and out of combat on short, rigid schedules. Soviet MiG-15 pilots, who had been withdrawn early in the War, later admitted that most North Korean and Chinese pilots did little more than give the Americans “aerial targets.”

The Soviet Union exported its first-generation jet fighter to nearly all of the Warsaw Pact nations, where they served for many years. Albania, as an example, flew a handful of MiG-15s at least until

late 2005—good lon-gevity for a 60-year-old design! The Soviet Union also licensed production to China, Poland and Czechoslo-vakia. About 18,000 MiG-15s, in 10 differ-ent variants, rolled out of Soviet and foreign factories by the time production ended. One of the variants was the two-seater MiG-15UTI Midget trainer, which is of special signifi-cance to War Eagles Air Museum. It is also the type of aircraft in which the first man to

The West’s first close-up look at the Soviet Union’s front-line fighter came on September 21, 1953, when 21-year-old North Kor-ean pilot Lt. Kum Sok No defected and flew his fully armed, com-bat-ready MiG-15bis to Kimpo Air Force Base, in Seoul, South Korea. His aircraft, number 2057, is now on display as seen here at the Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Dan Taylor (l.), Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) mechanic, Mu-seum founder John MacGuire (in cockpit) and Gary Hill (r.) run up a MiG-15 at Santa Teresa Airport. This photo was taken in front of the maintenance shop in 1988, before the Museum was built.


O n Sunday, September 12, 1943, a German Fieseler Fi-156C-3 Storch (Stork), coded SJ+LL

and adorned on its tail with the sinister swastika markings of the Third Reich, landed on an alpine meadow near the Campo Imperatore hotel in Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains of Italy, 75 miles north of Rome. Its pilot was Luftwaffe Hauptmann (Captain) Heinrich Gerlach. His mission was to pick up a very special passenger—none other than Il Duce him-self, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy for the last 23 years. The strut-ting, brutal dictator had been ousted from power in a bloodless coup on July 24 by Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio, and was now a prisoner in his own country. But, thanks to his ally Adolf Hitler, Mussolini was given a chance to escape punishment at the hands of the anarchists who had ta-ken over the Italian government.

Following a plan devised by notori-ous SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Otto Skorzeny, 90 Fallschirmjäger (parachute commandos) landed in 12 transport glid-ers and freed Mussolini from his Alpine prison. The erstwhile Italian dictator and Skorzeny climbed into Gerlach’s waiting


Storch as it idled on the meadow. After a dramatic short-field takeoff from the high plateau, the world’s premier (at the time) STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, its prominent spindly landing gear suggest-

ing its avian namesake, carried Mussolini to temporary “freedom” to Berlin by way of Rome as a pawn of der Führer.

What thoughts may have been going on in Mussolini’s mind, and what alter-natives may he have had, when he board-ed the Storch and began a journey that he could not know was to ultimately lead to his execution by Italian partisans in Milan less than two years later?

We can easily say today that Mussolini “should have known,” on that September day, that the war was all but over. We can ask how he could have thought the Axis could still de-feat the Allies. It is easy for us to think this today. We know how it turned out. Mussolini obviously did not. The Allied landings in nor-thern France on D-Day, a major turning point in the War, were still nine months in the future. True, the Allies, staging out of bases in North Africa, had recently captured Sicily, and had just the week be-fore landed in the “toe” of Italy and were moving smartly up the peninsula. But Mussolini could easily—and correctly—have felt that stiffer resistance and more difficult terrain would slow the Ameri-can, British and Canadian forces as they moved North. He had to make up his mind whether to return to his old ally or to accept isolation, and he had only his experience on which to base his decision.

Many people in Mussolini’s posi-tion, forced to choose among equally un-pleasant options without a “crystal ball” to see the future, would probably make the same decision. Hitler had persuaded

the deposed Mussolini that the Axis’ string of battlefield defeats, capped with Italy’s surrender a few days earlier, would end when his new “wonder weap-ons” entered the fray. This was easy to believe—the Germans were indeed de-veloping new weapons. The V-1 “cruise missile” (like the Storch, built by Ger-hard Fieseler Werke GmbH) became op-erational in June 1944. The Messer-schmitt Me-262 jet fighter first appeared in the embattled skies over Europe that August, and V-2 rockets began raining down on Antwerp and London in Sep-tember. These weapons were not opera-tional when Mussolini was “rescued,” and in fact did not have much effect on the conduct of the War. But they were all

well along in their test programs, and Hitler no doubt enthusiastically extolled their virtues to the Italian ex-dictator.

Another anxiety that drove Musso-lini’s decision was the fear of Italy’s total destruction. There is no question that he was a brutal dictator, but he was also a passionate Italian who had no desire to see his homeland destroyed. Archives clearly reveal Mussolini’s concern that

Perspectives (Continued on page 7)

Plane Talk on the Web

A rchives of Plane Talk from the current issue back to the first quarter of 2003 are now

available in full color on our website.

Historical Perspectives by Robert Haynes

Editor’s Note

B ecause of a temporary transfer to Beaumont, Texas, to help out with recovery operations

from Hurricane Ike, Robert Haynes could not finish the second part of his article on MiG-21s in Viet Nam. So we are re-running a slightly expanded version of one of his earlier columns in this issue. We look forward to the rest of his MiG-21 story as soon as he can finish it. Good luck, Robert!

Benito Mussolini boards Fieseler Storch at Campo Imperatore resort hotel, Italy, on September 12, 1943. Photo from Fieseler Fi.156 Storch im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Used without permission.



T he other day out in the hangar, I got to talking with Geronimo and George about our experiences in

renting airplanes away from our own lo-cal friendly neighborhood Fixed Base Operator (FBO). Of course, we all under-stood the need for checkout flights before FBOs let you rent their airplanes. And we understood the need to have all your pa-perwork in order—pilots license, medical certificate, proof of renters insurance, log book and all that stuff.

Then we got to discussing issues of aircraft type, availability and cost, such as whether the hourly price is dry or wet (including fuel, that is). Each FBO seems to have slightly different policies for let-ting people rent their airplanes.

“Yeah,” said Geronimo, “and don’t forget the maintenance of the airplane. I rented a little Cessna 172 one time and the danged throttle came right out of the instrument panel and ended up danglin’

down by my leg. I was lucky it happened dur-in’ my run up. Some-thin’ like that happen-in’ on final would’ve gotten my attention real quick.” Most FBOs make you take a checkout flight before they’ll rent you an airplane. Smaller places might do their own, while others have a Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) on staff whose job it is

to check you out. Some even have a cou-ple of CFIs, in which case, you have to call in advance if you want to have your checkout with a certain CFI. That usually takes a day or two to get set up. All of this calling and scheduling was way more than Geronimo wanted to deal with.

“I’ve had bad luck whenever there was several CFIs and I hadda pick one of ’em,” he said. “Hell, I never know whe-ther the CFI’s gonna match my personal-ity or not. I’ve picked out some real ty-rants in my time. You know the kind. Ya can’t satisfy ’em, and they’re hypercriti-cal about everything ya do. By the end of the checkout, sometimes I’ve wanted to punch the guy out.”

“I bet that feelin’ was mutual,” ob-served George dryly.

Geronimo grunted noncommittally and went on, undeterred. “At the other extreme, what about them CFIs who make ya do a cou-ple of maneuvers and then just sort of rear back and take a nap? It’s really hard for me to write out a check to pay somebody good money for doin’ noth-in’ but sleepin’.”

“It beats me how anyone could go to sleep the way you fly,” George quipped.

“Hey,” I said be-fore Geronimo had a

chance to retort, “let me tell you about a rental experience I had recently. As you guys know, I like to check out different FBOs during my travels, kinda like a hobby. So last week, I visited a little air-port down in Central Texas to get cleared to fly a 172. That place was somethin’ else. The runway was plenty long but real narrow. The old 172 that I rented was in good mechanical condition, but on the in-side I’d give it about a two on a scale of 10. It was sorta like steppin’ into a really old redneck’s car. I got the key from a little box with a combination lock at the tiedown spot. Durin’ the pre-flight, since I couldn’t find a ladder, I had to climb up on the nacelle and wing steps to check the fuel level. I was surprised my old knees would even let me do that.

“Anyway, I had a good flight check-out. After we landed, I taxied over to the gas pumps and shut ’er down. Then I at-tached the ground wire to the nose gear, unwound the heavy fuel hose with a big heavy nozzle on the end of it, carried a tall step ladder that I finally found over to the airplane, went back to the pumps, turned ’em on, selected the amount of fuel to pump (always estimate more than you think you’ll use) and slid my credit card through. That gave me two minutes to begin pumpin’. So back up the ladder I

Tailspins (Continued on page 7)

Another Editor’s Note

B ecause of the demands on his time from other activities, in-cluding publishing his second

book, Jim Parker’s Tailspins column has been AWOL from Plane Talk for a while. We were very pleased to re-ceive a new one from him recently. We hope you enjoy reading this latest tale in his ongoing series of percep-tive, amusing vignettes of some of av-iation’s more colorful characters.

Although it’s not exactly a tiny grass strip in the middle of no-where, Truth or Consequences Airport is one of the many smaller fields that Jim has flown from in his travels around the Southwest. Photo by Jim Parker.



went, haulin’ the fuel nozzle. After open-in’ the gas cap on the wing, I finally got to start pumpin’ fuel. Whew!

“We’d used seven gallons for our 1.3 hour flight. I’d selected 10 on the pump, so I was safe. When I was done fuelin’, I put everything around the pumps back in order. Then I hopped back into the 172, started ’er up, taxied over to the parkin’ pad, shut down, pushed ‘er back into po-sition, set the chocks and tied ’er down. Then I wrote out a check for the rental time and left it in the logbook, and put the key back into the little combination lock box contraption. But I wasn’t done yet. Next I got out the cleanin’ spray and some rags and wiped the dead bugs off the leadin’ edges of the wings and the struts and the windshield. In central Texas, there sure was a lot of ’em to wipe off. Lastly, I tidied up the interior and made sure the control lock was firmly secured in place. Then, all sweaty and tired and wore plumb out, I finally got

Tailspins (Continued from page 6)

Membership Application War Eagles Air Museum

War Eagles Air Museum memberships are available in six categories. All memberships include the following privileges:

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To become a Member of the War Eagles Air Museum, please fill in the information requested below and note the category of mem-bership you desire. Mail this form, along with a check payable to “War Eagles Air Museum” for the annual fee shown, to:

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into my car and headed fer home—four hours after I got to that little airport.

“But the best part of the whole ex-perience was the checkout. That ol’ CFI really put me through my paces. I didn’t know if I was comin’ or goin’ some-times. He had me doin’ landin’ and full power stalls with and without flaps, 60-degree steep turns in full circles left and right, with me havin’ to stay within only 100 feet of my entry altitude, slow flight down to minimum controllable airspeed, with and without flaps, landin’s with and without flaps, then short field takeoffs and landin’s. That workout sure made me sweat, but it got me back in the groove. He worked my butt off, that’s for sure.

“And after all that I got signed off to fly their little 172. I look forward to doin’ just that next time I travel there…”

“Hell,” George snorted, “I wouldn’t work that hard even for sex.”

“Sex?” Geronimo pondered for a minute with a wistful look on his face. Then he had a question. “What is this sex of which you speak?” he deadpanned.

all he had built would be annihilated. He realized that not only the Allies, but the Germans as well, threatened Italy’s exis-tence. Mussolini believed Hitler would not allow Italy to be a base for Allied op-erations against Germany. Thus, he rea-soned, it was better for Italy to seek Ger-man protection rather than risk the possi-bility of “scorched-earth” combat utterly destroying his beloved country.

Some people today may see this rea-soning as naïve, and think that Mussolini should have known the Germans would sacrifice Italy anyway. But, had the Itali-an forces been better defenders, Rome might not have fallen when it did and the War could have lasted much longer.

Imagine yourself as Mussolini on that Alpine meadow, standing next to the idling Storch with its flaps set for a short-field take-off. Do you climb aboard and strap in, or do you stay behind and watch your last hope climb away and vanish over the distant horizon?

Perspectives (Continued from page 5)


War Eagles Air Museum Doña Ana County Airport at Santa Teresa 8012 Airport Road Santa Teresa, New Mexico 88008 (575) 589-2000

by Victor tankers, flew from England to bomb the Falklands’ main airfield at Stanley. At the time, these were the longest-range combat missions ever flown. The RAF’s last Vulcan squadron was disband-ed in March 1984, at which time the curtain seemed to have fallen for good on the era of Avro’s big delta.

But today, thanks to the dedicated efforts of a small army of fin-ancial sponsors, volun-teers and enthusiastic public contributors, one of these magnificent aircraft is flying again. Vulcan B.2 XH558, the 12th B.2 produced and the last Vulcan in RAF ser-vice, was painstakingly restored at Brun-tingthorpe Aerodrome, about 75 miles north of London—a project that spanned nearly 15 years. Its first post-restoration

Renowned test pilot Roly Falk took the Vulcan prototype into the air for the first time on August 30, 1952. Early test-ing showed that the pure delta wing had a problem with severe buffeting under load at high speeds. Avro ran an extensive ser-ies of flight tests and developed the solu-tion of fitting a “kinked” leading edge on the wing. Aircraft with this modification were designated Vulcan B.2, and all earli-er production versions were eventually retrofitted with the new wing.

Vulcans entered RAF service in Sep-tember 1956 with the delivery of XA897. The very next month, that aircraft was destroyed on landing at London’s Heath-row airport in bad weather, after an im-pressive around-the-world, show-the-flag tour. By the end of production, Avro had built 134 Vulcans, the last of which was delivered in January 1965.

The only time Vulcans saw combat was in the 1982 Falklands War with Ar-gentina. Five Vulcans, refueled in the air

Editorial (Continued from page 1)

flight, a 34-minute local hop, took place on October 18, 2007, and it was soon “cleared to fly” after a further series of test flights proved its airworthiness. To-day, the only flying example of this his-toric Cold War aircraft enthralls cheering crowds at its dramatic air show appear-ances throughout England.

The Avro Vulcan was one of the most distinctive aircraft ever to fly. In October 2007, Vulcan B.2 XH558, seen here climbing out at a recent airshow demonstration in England, became the only flying example of this superb Cold War aircraft in the world.

The Newsletter of the War Eagles Air Museum Editorial F

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