The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 11 Edizione posteriore

Supermarine’s Swift was a good-looking post-war jet, but caused a procurement crisis which set a pattern for British defence-equipment-buying disasters that endures to this day. In the cover story of our newest issue, TAH11, Professor Keith Hayward takes a detailed look at what went wrong. Other features include a history of France’s shapely SNCASO Bretagne airliner, sometimes referred to as a “pocket Constellation”; plus the little-known story of the BAe Hawk’s combat role in the Second Congo War in 1998, when the Air Force of Zimbabwe flew what were surely the shortest-range strike missions in history — within the length of a single runway! Meanwhile, looking back at aviation’s earliest years, we reassess the Curtiss-Langley Affair, in which vested interests conspired to “prove” that Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s tandem-winged monoplane had flown before the 1903 Wright Flyer. All these stories, and many more, are illustrated with high-quality archive photographs and bespoke artwork.