I’ve recently started using MSFS 2020 (review here), and while VFR roaming the beautiful scenery is fun, my true love is instrument flying and following official procedures. Here both the realism and the understanding of real procedures can be greatly improved by using real aviation charts. Here are some free […]
I’m a long-time Microsoft Flight Simulator user. I started with 4.0. Back then scenery was extremely limited, so you were mostly limited to instrument flying – which I learned to love, to the point that when we had to give a presentation at school, my talk was about aircraft navigation. […]
The Flugausstellung Hermeskeil in the Hunsrück mountains in western Germany has an interesting collection of mostly Cold War-era military aircraft. It consists of several indoor halls and a large outdoor area. German and British aircraft are well represented, while US Navy aircraft are absent. Among the largest aircraft are a […]
Foto’s van de Luchtmachtdagen 2013 in Volkel.
In its 30+ year career with the US Air Force, the F-4 Phantom II wore several distinctive paint schemes, unlike its Navy brothers. They started out in the same scheme, though – Gull gray and white: This scheme was still in use during the first months of the Vietnam War, […]
To me, the F-4 Phantom II is the greatest jet fighter, and possibly the greatest combat aircraft, ever. A development period of just a few years (compare that to current project such as the Eurofighter, F-22, or JSF) yielded an aircraft that, from its first flight in 1958, set new […]
In The Age of Airpower, Martin van Creveld writes about the history and development of airpower. The book is divided into five parts: The beginnings, World War II, the Cold War, smaller wars from 1945 on, and what he calls “war amongst the people”, i.e. counterinsurgency warfare. As such, it […]
Foto’s van de Luchtmachtdagen op 18 juni 2010 te Gilze-Rijen. Helaas was het weer niet zo geweldig, waardoor ook het fotograferen moeilijk was. Bijna alle foto’s op ISO800 om ook bij f8 een korte sluitertijd mogelijk te maken. En je kunt nooit genoeg millimeters hebben… In dit geval Nikon D90 […]
Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason, tells the story of a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. Mason had always wanted to fly and already held a private pilot’s license when he volunteered for the Army to fly helicopters. His flight training is recounted in the book. He is then assigned to […]
I have re-read two books by Stephen Coonts, Flight of the Intruder and The Intruders. They tell the story of Jake Grafton, a US Navy pilot flying the Grumman A-6 Intruder, during his second Vietnam war cruise in 1972 and a peacetime cruise in in 1972. Coonts was an Intruder […]
This is an overview of the most important Soviet aircraft of WW II. Fighters At the start of the war with Germany, the Polikarpov I-16 was the most numerous fighter. It was armed with two 7.62mm MGs and two 20mm cannons, at lower altitudes it performed equal to the Bf109E. […]
