Ever since the Wright brothers used a falling weight from a tower to accelerate some of their early aircraft on takeoff when winds alone were not enough, the need to apply external energy to achieve flying speed has been recognized and pursued in different ways. The Wright’s device was an early form of a catapult, a system much-modified and used by aircraft carriers still.

But another takeoff booster found favor because it could be attached to many types of aircraft and did not require a modified runway or takeoff surface. Commonly known as JATO, for jet-assisted takeoff, it is also called RATO for rocket-assisted takeoff. You get the idea from either acronym — a special thruster helps accelerate the aircraft to give it flying speed more quickly. [Read more…]

The first generation of jet aircraft during World War II involved a nearly universal rush to produce a viable fast fighter aircraft. Germany’s Me 262, America’s P-59 — and more operationally suitable P-80 — and England’s Gloster Meteor all had the fighter mission as primary when they were designed.

After the war, purpose-built jet bombers were a logical step in the accelerating turbojet revolution.

But the world’s first jet bomber design was a 1944 German product from the Arado company, the Ar 234B. Some writers delight in using gutturally-pronounced German military names in articles describing wartime technological advances made in that country, and one of the Ar 234B bomber’s monikers sounds like something out of a movie script: Schnellbomber.

It means Fast Bomber, a promise the Ar 234B delivered. Otherwise, the Ar 234 was known as the Blitz or Lightning. [Read more…]

The art and science of aerial firefighting is at once simple and not so simple.

The concept is easy: Use aircraft to release water or fire retardant liquid on or next to wildfires for suppression. [Read more…]

Every time the pilot of a 16-ton F/A-18 Super Hornet plants the jet on the deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, an unbreakable thread of history stretches from that landing back over more than a century to the first shipboard landing.

The year was 1911. The Wright brothers’ celebrated accomplishment at Kitty Hawk was barely seven years earlier. Some observers in the U.S. Navy sensed the airplane would have a military application, but for the moment that application was largely unformed.

Airplanes and automobiles defined the new century, and those who were drawn to the mechanical marvels of either machine often crossed over and embraced the other. Eugene Ely first became a road race driver, chauffeur, and automobile salesman. When a Portland, Oregon, automobile dealer began selling Curtiss Pusher biplanes, the transition for Eugene Ely came quickly. [Read more…]

If Consolidated’s PBY Catalina flying boats and amphibians set the tone for U.S. Navy seaplanes before and during World War II, that company’s larger four-engine PB2Y Coronado flew in relative obscurity.

Budgetary math did not favor the big Coronado; the first six PB2Y-2 models ordered by the U.S. Navy in March 1939 cost as much as 18 twin-engine PBYs.

More than 200 PB2Y-3 variants were built. Some served as patrol bombers, others underwent modification to become long-range transports. [Read more…]

If the U.S. Navy and Goodyear gained icon status as operators of blimps in the United States, the U.S. Army was a big player in the interwar years.

U.S. Army lighter-than-air aircraft can be traced to reconnaissance balloons used during the Civil War by Thaddeus Lowe in support of the Union Army.

In 1921 the U.S. Army operated the semi-rigid Italian-built airship Roma, the largest semi-rigid design in the world at the time, with a length of 410′.

Buoyed by hydrogen, the Roma came to grief near its base at Langley Field, Virginia, in 1922 when the nose collapsed during high-speed flying, and the ensuing hydrogen fire gave the U.S. military the resolve to fill all of their future airships with nonflammable helium instead. [Read more…]