The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 28 Vorige editie

From “Lone Wolf” photo-recce Dassault Mirages, thundering through the mountain valleys of Switzerland, to a Fairey Barracuda being rolled over the edge of a coastal cliff in Wales to plunge on to the rocks below (yes!), this 28th quarterly edition of The Aviation Historian contains plenty to excite and surprise. This summer’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo Moon-landing has prompted us to mark the occasion in typically oblique TAH style: not by rehashing the story of Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind” — plenty of that on the TV — but by looking at the earliest serious attempts to launch people vertically by rocket, without actually killing them. This happened in World War Two in Germany — the source of much early spaceflight technology — when the bizarre Bachem Ba 349 Natter rocket interceptor fighter was being designed and tested. Elsewhere in TAH28 we explore the political beginnings of the Airbus airliner programme (which also celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) as well as RAF heavy airborne guns; eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes’s long and special relationship with the Lockheed Constellation; attempts to convert the Douglas DC-4E airliner and its smaller stablemate the DC-4/C-54 into bombers, and much, much more. All this is illustrated with high-quality archive photographs and bespoke artwork.