The Aviation Historian Magazine Issue 29 Retour à l'édition précédente

DesDid you know that the iconic Harrier jump-jet very nearly didn’t happen? It seems incredible, looking back over the 50 years since it entered RAF service, that its success was ever in doubt; but for a long time the UK government’s axe hovered menacingly over its progenitor, the Hawker P.1127. If that axe had fallen, the Harrier would never have existed. Read the full story in this 29th quarterly issue of The Aviation Historian. Another innovative aircraft, which this time did not come to fruition, was France’s delta-winged, nuclear-powered “Super-Caravelle” SST of 1958, a sort of radioactive Concorde: we take a detailed look at the project. Elsewhere in the issue we bust a few myths about pre-WW2 laminar-airflow research in the UK and USA; track the little-known careers of the Martin 2-0-2 and 4-0-4 airliners in TWA service; and chronicle the story of SNCASE’s odd but attractive Voltigeur ground-attack aircraft of the 1950s. And there’s more: USAF Phantoms against the Khmer Rouge off the coast of Cambodia; flying DC-3s for Hunting Surveys Ltd; unravelling the identities of some significant B-24 Liberators in the Pacific; and flicking through a relic from 1911 — the first-ever commercially-available pilot’s logbook. All this is illustrated with high-quality archive photographs and bespoke artwork.cription to come