The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 27 Retour à l'édition précédente

We couldn’t let Concorde’s 50th anniversary go unmarked in this 27th quarterly edition of The Aviation Historian; and so — in typical TAH style — instead of trotting out the well-known history, we are looking at the rocky, decade-long political path that resulted in the Anglo-French project to create the Mach 2 transport icon. Another major article in the issue concerns the Hawker Typhoon: we all know it suffered problems with catastrophic structural failure of the tail, but the fix involved much more than just adding reinforcements to the rear-fuselage transport joint. Richard Seth-Smith, who lost his test-pilot father in one of the accidents, uses contemporary documents and a recently-rediscovered letter to reveal just how complex the investigation and the solution turned out to be. Elsewhere in TAH27 we explore Qantas’s WW2 Indian Ocean services using Catalina flying-boats; Vought F4U Corsairs with the Argentinian Navy; Egypt’s Hispano/Helwan HA-300 lightweight fighter of 1964; a bizarre French single-bladed rotary-wing experiment of the 1910s; newly-unearthed details of a wildly ambitious supersonic swing-wing (and swing-tail) jet fighter; the story of the deeply dodgy Bahamas World Airways; and the little-known Junkers K 47/A 48 fighter of the mid-1920s. Finally, we pay tribute to Richard T. Riding, TAH’s “Honorary Grandfather”, who died in January.