Only ten Curtiss NC flying boats were ever built. It does look a fragile thing to fly across the Atlantic, but it made it. As with many early aviators tragedy followed for one of them, Rodd was killed in an air crash in 1932. 

Had a great uncle who flew both the southern and northern routes for Howard during the second war Tommy. His parents were those butcher shop owners in Buffalo. He was a flight engineer and they would fly from Quebec City to Prestwick Scotland on the northern route and from Brazil to North Africa and beyond on the southern route. Often wondered how they managed to get the big shots back and forth from the States to the other side without losing them in convoys. Now we know.

Following the devastation of Pearl Harbour, US morale and pride were badly dented. Great ships were sunk, aircraft destroyed on the ground, many men killed and a nation humbled. It would be a long, hard and costly route back to eventual victory but the whole nation desperately needed a act of defiance, a message of intent and purpose to show the Japs there was going to be grave consequences for their treachery and the answer to this seemingly impossible gesture in so short a time came from a great aviator and pioneer, the multi talented James Harold Doolittle, forever known as Jimmy. Jimmy was born in California in 1896 but was raised in Nome Alaska. He was a boxer and a martial arts expert, so he loved a good scrap. In 1917 he joined the aviation section of the Signals Corp and six months later was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, becoming a First Lieutenant in 1920. He was marked out as being a bit special when he was chosen to pilot a trans-continental flight, making just one stop to refuel. It took him almost 22 hours for which he received the DFC. It's often a fact that the truly outstanding pilots have an engineering background, like Lindbergh and Brown and Jimmy was the same, he gained a Doctor of Science Degree in Aeronautics and testing aircraft followed it. Later the Shell oil company employed him for testing purposes and in 1934 he sampled his first experience with the military in an organisational capacity, followed by becoming President of the Institute of Aeronautical Science in 1940. Following the attack on Pearl he volunteered to lead a raid on Tokyo itself, a crazy stunt that would forever carry his name, the Doolittle raid.

I said it was a crazy stunt and here's why. The US was going to steam on a 10.000 mile round journey, risking most of the remaining Pacific fleet to drop a few bombs on Tokyo. Had it failed and the fleet intercepted, it would have been disastrous. They wouldn't have lost the war, but the consequences would have been truly dire. 

The concept and plan for retaliation is drawn up and they decided to bomb Tokyo itself, the problem being, Tokyo is a mere 5118 miles away, so a couple of drop tanks aren't going to do the job. The only way is to deliver the bombers to within striking distance and the only thing able to do that is an aircraft carrier and no bomber has ever taken off a carrier before. Doolittle is chosen to organise a team and the feasibility of such a plan and it truly was a case of the right man at the right time in the right place. He chose the B25 and the team to carry it out. They had just 440 feet to get the bomber into the air off a rolling deck, which was out of the question with a full bomb load, so they were restricted to just one ton each. It is not the bombs they are really delivering though, it is the most important lesson the Japs could possibly get at the time..... we're coming for you. The bombers are stripped bare to save weight, which even includes their rear guns, which are replaced with dummy broom handles painted black. They practice takeoffs on a runway and the first time it is ever done for real is when Doolittle himself leads from the front and lumbers off the end of the USS Enterprise, in what looks like a slow motion film. Imagine if Doolittle had gone head first into the sea? It doesn't bare thinking about, does it? A second carrier the USS Hornet went along to supply air support and these two carriers were screened by four cruisers and eight destroyers. Of the 17 planes that made the attempt, only one went into the sea. They were forced to take off earlier than desired following contact with some Jap fishing boats, which they blew out of the water. Had they signalled the presence of this attack fleet? They couldn't take the chance and left the deck 1250 miles short of their planned take off point. This only added another level of problems, as now they might not make it to China, where they intended to either land, if possible, or bail out. Fortunately, their first stroke of luck was a following wind, which supplied them with just enough help to complete the journey. Flying just above the waves they only climbed just before their bombing run. I don't think that a mere sixteen tons of bombs ever caused so much damage. They killed 50 people and injured 400 but the greatest injury was to Japanese pride, psychology, perception and feeling of invincibility. They had been told by their leaders this was impossible, yet there was Jimmy coming straight in through their front door. The Japs captured eight of the flyers and in a characteristically barbaric fashion, executed 3 of them. Three more were killed on crash landing and only one plane survived, after flying into Russia, where it was interned. The remaining flyers all ended up in China, where they were protected by the people and it was they who would suffer the full  barbarity of the Japanese, who murdered tens of thousands of them for it. When he returned to the States, Jimmy was rushed off to the White House where Roosevelt pinned on the Congressional Medal of Honour himself. Jimmy was quite taken aback, as he believed every man should have got the same, but it doesn't work like that. He thanked the President adding, he would spend the rest of his life trying to earn it.

I have to make a mention of an aircraft which was so controversial, it amounted to a form of suicide to one of its main instigators and brought the world's major alliance to breaking point. It also sent one of our own ex team members apoplectic with rage at its very mention. It is of course, the MIG 15 and the member was Flash. The Russians had picked up their fair share of German technology after the war and this enabled them to produce their first jet fighter, the MIG 9 but it was under powered. The designer of the MIG, which took his initials Mikhail Gurevich, approached the Soviet aviation minister to get permission off Stalin to approach the Brits for their advanced centrifugal flow jet engine, the Nene. What fool would sell us their secrets, Stalin replied, well British ones was the answer because that's what the Commie leaning British government did, along with the permission to build it. Not that the Soviets needed permission, they were like the Chinese of today, intellectual property is for stealing. However, they got the lot and the Yanks were livid. The result was the MIG 15 and it was a match for anything in the world. Its first kill signified the end of the old great and the beginning of the new one, when it downed a P38 Lightening. In the Korean war its main foe was another legend, the F86 Sabre, a plane that could out-turn and out dive the MIG but was inferior in acceleration and climb. The Sabre also had straight wings to the MIG's swept design, which was a feature the Yanks would adopt. Incidentally, swept wing design is claimed by a number of countries. The Germans alone were looking at it in 1935 but the power to harness them was just not available at the time. Before the arrival of the MIG 15, the allies had adopted a policy of daylight bombing, which was halted when the MIG began tearing up the slow moving bombers. It gave the Soviets a platform from which would spring numerous designs, some unbelievably awful and others exceptionally good.

The f-86 Sabre had swept wings Major.

Now we move on to the daddy of all bombers, the monster that is the Boeing B52. If ever a plane looked the part, the B52 is it. It looks nasty, it is nasty and you wouldn't want to be on its bad side. I once saw one fly and it is mighty impressive. Commissioned in 1955, it still retains a strategic, as well as a tactical role. It came about even as WW2 was still being fought because the invention of the jet engine in Britain suddenly rendered the much vaunted B29 and B36 piston powered aircraft obsolete. Not just that but AVRO in Britain were building the mighty V force of bombers, all jet powered, including the beautiful and deadly Vulcan bomber, the brainchild of none other than the designer of the Lancaster, Chadwick. The Yanks needed to catch up and the B52 was eventually their answer, which consequently saw the light of day just before the Vulcan. The B36 was technically the US's first jet powered bomber but the jets fitted were only there to supplement the huge piston engines, six in all. Five other models with jet engines were tested but they were just medium bombers, like the all jet B45, having four engines and the B48 having six, all heading for the scrap bin. Boeing then arrived with the forerunner of the B52, the B47, which used a swept wing design, something only fighters had. The problem here was speed at takeoff to deliver the lift necessary using swept wings, this was overcome by using disposable rocket engines on take off. All stop gap aircraft which finally paved the way to the B52, eight engined heavy bomber, as capable of dropping conventional bombs as well as nuclear. A fleet of more than 100 B52'a now became the US's major deterrent in the cold war, until the arrival of the inter continental ballistic missile. What's the problem with them? They had no pilots and couldn't be called back, whoops! Throughout its career the B52 would carry an amazing amount of technological weapons, including guided missiles, yet still retain the ability to conventionally bomb the shite out of armies on the ground, as was seen in Vietnam and even as late as the Gulf War.

Before the smoke had cleared from Hiroshima, the British government were looking to an aircraft that was capable of carrying the nuclear weapon they thought they would receive from their US ally, considering the effort they had put into it but the newly created McMahon act in the US forbade the export of any nuclear knowledge, so they went ahead and produced their own. This nuclear deterrent needed a special aircraft, with a monumental leap in design and technology to deliver it over the distances envisaged for the future, ie the USSR. In 1947 the government issued its specification and three companies were chosen to submit designs, A.V. Roe (AVRO'S) Handley Page and Vickers. Vickers went for a more traditional design (Valiant) which did end up filling a gap, whilst the other two submitted revolutionary designs, which were the Vulcan and the Victor bombers. Avro's technical director was the famous Roy Chadwick, designer of the game changing Lancaster bomber, who does overtly get a great deal of the credit for the Vulcan design but in fact it was his forgotten Chief Designer, Stuart Davies who was most responsible for the aircraft, as Chadwick was killed in 47 in an air crash. Avro's chose to go for a truly revolutionary delta wing design, which whilst not being unknown, no successful aircraft with this configuration had been in service. The delta design is credited to the German designer Alexander Lippisch, who flew a small delta winged plane as far back as 1931 and his design, like all others before the Vulcan, had no tail. However, the Russians also lay claim to the first when they flew a delta winged glider, again with no tail, back in 1921. All 'flying wings' as they were known then and later, had their engines on the outside, whereas the Vulcan would have its four engines incorporated into the wings and have a traditional fuselage and tail wing. To test the validity of the design, two smaller prototypes were built for extensive testing, one for high speed and one for low and on the successful results of these two, the company went ahead with the full sized aircraft.

The enterprise, ingenuity and innovation with which the British aircraft industry operated in those days was quite remarkable. The post war aircraft industry did lead the world, until successive politicians destroyed most of it. It's an example to realise that the aircraft that preceded the Vulcan was none other than the Lancaster, the Vulcan was its replacement and the leap is almost science fiction. Visually, it was like nothing ever seen before and its performance was a quantum leap in anything that had come before. When you consider that the Yank equivalent was the mighty B52, you see why it was so unconventional. It comprised of over 100,000 parts, 50,000 tools and jigs were required to build it. The government specification was for a bomber to carry a 10,000 lb bomb, ie nuclear, or 20,000lbs of conventional bombs, a range of 1500 miles at 500 MPH cruising speed,  at a ceiling of 50,000ft. So just a small step up from the Lancaster then. The first Vulcans had no defence systems, as they were capable of out flying and out manoeuvring anything the Russians had. On its very first test flight they flew it around Cheshire (where I live) for two hours and literally fetched the county to a standstill, as traffic stopped to watch this UFO in the sky and if you've ever been there when it takes off or flies over you, you will never forget the sound, a sound that is called the Vulcan howl and it is the loudest aircraft I've ever heard, including Concorde, as four Rolls Royce Olympus engines suck in tons of air through a small gap and explode it out the back. It really is music. Incredibly, a mere two weeks after its maiden flight it was taken to the Farnborough airshow and in front of thousands of spectators, the famous WW2 pilot Roly Beaumont. actually rolled it just after take off! Stuck it on its arse and climbed vertical like a small intercepter. It is just one of four aircraft, from the hundreds of designs the Brits have produced over the last 100 years, that can bring a tear to a grown man's eye (not a woman's, as they don't understand these things) the Spitfire, Lancaster, Harrier and the Vulcan.

The enterprise, ingenuity and innovation with which the British aircraft industry operated in those days was quite remarkable. The post war aircraft industry did lead the world, until successive politicians destroyed most of it. It's an example to realise that the aircraft that preceded the Vulcan was none other than the Lancaster, the Vulcan was its replacement and the leap is almost science fiction. Visually, it was like nothing ever seen before and its performance was a quantum leap in anything that had come before. When you consider that the Yank equivalent was the mighty B52, you see why it was so unconventional. It comprised of over 100,000 parts, 50,000 tools and jigs were required to build it. The government specification was for a bomber to carry a 10,000 lb bomb, ie nuclear, or 20,000lbs of conventional bombs, a range of 1500 miles at 500 MPH cruising speed,  at a ceiling of 50,000ft. So just a small step up from the Lancaster then. The first Vulcans had no defence systems, as they were capable of out flying and out manoeuvring anything the Russians had. On its very first test flight they flew it around Cheshire (where I live) for two hours and literally fetched the county to a standstill, as traffic stopped to watch this UFO in the sky and if you've ever been there when it takes off or flies over you, you will never forget the sound, a sound that is called the Vulcan howl and it is the loudest aircraft I've ever heard, including Concorde, as four Rolls Royce Olympus engines suck in tons of air through a small gap and explode it out the back. It really is music. Incredibly, a mere two weeks after its maiden flight it was taken to the Farnborough airshow and in front of thousands of spectators, the famous WW2 pilot Roly Beaumont. actually rolled it just after take off! Stuck it on its arse and climbed vertical like a small intercepter. It is just one of four aircraft, from the hundreds of designs the Brits have produced over the last 100 years, that can bring a tear to a grown man's eye (not a woman's, as they don't understand these things) the Spitfire, Lancaster, Harrier and the Vulcan.

‍What year was the Vulcan introduced? I have always loved airplanes & I first became aware of the Vulcan when it was featured in the James Bond movie Thunderball. It was truly a beautiful craft. I never saw it fly but I did witness the Concorde land & fly at Buffalo International Airport. Talk about "sound", it definitely had the "wow" factor.

The specification was issued in !947 and she flew for then first time in 1952 but was not handed over to the RAF until 1956. Flying is one thing, military service is another, One of the other aircraft built to meet the spec was the superb Handley Page Victor. It never quite made it as a nuclear strike plane due to its nasty habit off producing cracks at continuous low level flight, a requirement in all British planes, as we a fetish for low flight. It went on to become a top class tanker plane and for my money, one of the most brutal looking planes of all time, this plane looks like it wants to kill. Had it made the cut it would have been another of those tear jerkers, I'm sure. Incidentally, the Vulcan initially had a problem of vibration on the wings, which was caused by the wings being a straight triangle. This problem was solved by angling the wings three times before the wing tip. It had the nickname 'the tin triangle.' The James Bond film was Thunderball, which was the fourth Bond film.

Delta wings were chosen for the Concorde because the Brits had cracked the art of building such a formulae. It was tried and tested.

I mention the B52 as being the Yank equivalent but as I have covered before, there were four other models of B bombers before that, some having props to supplement the jets before they were eventually phased out.

I mention the B52 as being the Yank equivalent but as I have covered before, there were four other models of B bombers before that, some having props to supplement the jets before they were eventually phased out.

‍‍Good point in a prior post about the need for the B52 with missiles being available to do the same job. No pilots, no recall possible after the launch. The B52 is still active today with the plane being older than the crew. My car old car partner (police jargon) had a cabin in the foothills of the Adirondacks near Fort Drum. B52's from Plattsburg Air Force base used to do training missions nearby & the sound was awesome. Gave me a semi-woody. I was much younger back then. Oh the memories, if ya know what I mean.

The Death of a Canadian Dream.

You didn't think Turdope Snr would allow Canada a weapon that might worry his fellow commies in the Kremlin did you?

You didn't think Turdope Snr would allow Canada a weapon that might worry his fellow commies in the Kremlin did you?

‍‍During the Falklands War the military strategy was to win the air & sea battle first, & then land on the island. Not every admiral/general was that confident that could be done. The objective was 8,000 miles away, the Brits only had 20 sub-sonic Harriers for the air war, two small old carriers, & logistic problems up the wazoo. The first air strike at the Port Stanley runway was conducted by an "aging" Vulcan whose pilot had to refuel in the air 13 times before arriving on location. Now that's coming from a long way to deliver the goods.

Tom, I highly recommend that you go to youtube and put in the search box .... XM607 Falklands most daring raid. It's quite remarkable what these..... loonies in a Vulcan,  got up to and you'll have a very entertaining 45 minutes. High drama that will have you shaking your head in disbelief at times. The Vulcans were within weeks of the scrap yard but so was the carrier HMS Hermes, in fact, its engines broke down just out of port. Our amphibious landing ships, Fearless and Intrepid were just 3 months from the scrapyard too. If the Argies had hung on a little longer, it might have come off.

Tom, I highly recommend that you go to youtube and put in the search box .... XM607 Falklands most daring raid. It's quite remarkable what these..... loonies in a Vulcan,  got up to and you'll have a very entertaining 45 minutes. High drama that will have you shaking your head in disbelief at times. The Vulcans were within weeks of the scrap yard but so was the carrier HMS Hermes, in fact, its engines broke down just out of port. Our amphibious landing ships, Fearless and Intrepid were just 3 months from the scrapyard too. If the Argies had hung on a little longer, it might have come off.

‍Thank for the tip Major. Will give it a try, but I am a techtard ya know. I am up to the point where the Brits sunk the General Beltrano which was an old WWII cruiser with a significant loss of life. Of course this was war but she was sunk outside of the inclusion zone & Mrs. Thatcher's government was severely criticized. But wait, shortly thereafter HMS Sheffield was sunk so it was a one for one deal which diminished the political pressure. Imagine that? You had to lose one of yours to justify sinking one of theirs????? What has the world come to?

The Belgrano had been entering and leaving the exclusion zone a number of times, but she was making a course towards one of the carriers and the RN believed they were trying to capture her between a pincer movement with their carrier on the other side, one we sold them. We were not going to take any chances, as with one carrier out, it would be time to pack up a go home, or maybe not, as when we were committed the Yanks finally came down on our side, fecked that Fenien Kirkpatrick off, who was itching to sell us down the river. Even Haig had thoughts on siding with Argentina and tried to persuade us to let them go. To his credit, when the US came decisively down on our side, Haig tried his best to get them to ship out but they themselves were adamant. Haig, who had been supreme NATO commander in Europe told Galtieri straight, he said "have you any idea just what a professional and ruthless bunch of people are on their way to see you? I've worked with these people in Europe, I know what I'm talking about." He was talking mainly about the Royal Marines and the Paras. The Belgrano was actually and ex US Cruiser that had survived Pearl Harbour. Her original name was USS Phoenix. Another game changer was the supply of American air to air sidewinder missiles.