The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 14 Vorige editie

Put yourself in the cockpit of an American combat jet during the Vietnam War: suddenly warning lights flash and alarms blare as your aircraft is hit by ground fire. Your only option is to eject, so you punch out — over dense, Vietcong-held jungle. You think of fellow squadron aircrew who did the same, and have never come back. But for you it’s different: as your ejection seat decelerates, a 14ft-diameter windmilling rotor unfolds behind your head, the sides of the seat-frame rotate aft to form a twin-finned tailboom . . . and a small but powerful turbofan engine spools-up behind the small of your back. Your aircraft-within-an-aircraft will carry you to friendly territory, and you’ll survive to fight another day. This story, about the USAF/US Navy AERCAB “flyaway” ejection-seat project, is just one of the in-depth features in the new issue, TAH14. Others include the Vickers V.1000 jet transport; how two long-forgotten Japanese aviators flew from Tokyo to Rome in 1931; a first-hand account of a trip with Air America, the CIA’s secret airline, to a remote mountain airstrip in Laos; and the World War Two “air bridge” between Russia and the West which enabled Allied leaders to have face-to-face meetings. All these stories, and many more, are illustrated with high-quality archive photographs and bespoke artwork.