An F-15 Eagle joined the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum Aug. 13, under the eye of Col. Cesar Rodriguez, who scored two kills in the jet.

Republic Aviation was a great company. The Seversky Aircraft Company was founded in 1931 and reorganized on October 13, 1939 to become Republic Aviation. In July 1965 Fairchild acquired Republic Aviation and it became a division of Fairchild Hiller in September 1965. In 1981 on the 50th Anniversary employees were given a plastic Frisbee to commemorate this event.  Republic Aviation’s plant was in Farmingdale, Long Island it produced quite a few famous aircraft.

Chuck Yeager in the cockpit of an NF-104, 4 December 1963. But it was the 10th of Dec when things went wrong.... Yeager’s mission on that fateful day was to test the NF-104’s performance at high alti...

Pratt & Whitney manufactures aircraft engines. On their famous logo with the Eagle, it says: “Dependable Engines”. In later years the company had the following slogan: “The Eagle means Business”. They have been manufacturing engines (piston and jet) since 1925. The man who started it was Frederick Brant Rentschler. And you thought the company was started by two people named Pratt and Whitney!

He was just a boy of 10. It was 1933. He was sitting on a stone wall looking out at the wheat field of his family farm. All he knew up to this point in his life was living and working on the farm and he didn’t have a problem with that. His name was Tom. His full name was Thomas B.

My wife and I had returned from a trip to upstate New York in March 2015 and on our way home we stopped at the New England Air Museum.  It is a gem of a museum nestled in the tranquil woodlands next to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.  Back in 1969 it was called the Bradley Air Museum, but on October 3, 1979 the museum was struck by a tornado and almost completely destroyed. 

Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, was against America going into WWII. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, however, he wanted to do whatever he could for the war effort. President Roosevelt didn’t want a national hero to be involved in any actual combat lest he got hurt or killed. Also, the president held some deep resentment against Mr. Lindbergh because of Lindbergh’s activities before the war.

The historic Boeing B-52 Bomber first flew 57 years ago on April 15, 1952. The B-52’s official name is ‘Stratofortress’ but its nickname is BUFF which stands for ‘Big Ugly Fat Fellow’ (among other things). The B-52 has been used in combat missions from the Vietnam War up to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. NASA has used a B-52 (Serial Number 52-0008 – it was the 10th one off the assembly line) from 1959 until 2004 as a “Mothership” to lift aloft experimental and research aircraft on test flights.

Boeing - Airbus, Etc.

Sikorsky - Hiller - Hughes - Bell Helicopter - Robinson, Etc.

F-15 Eagle, F-16 Falcon, F-22 Raptor, Mv-22 Osprey, Etc.

Boeing - Airbus - Embraer, Etc.

American Airlines - Southwest Airlines, Etc.

Cessna - Piper - Beechcraft

If you recall in the 1965 version of the movie “The Flight of the Phoenix” the character Heinrich Dorfmann says the following: “In 1841 Henson and Stringfellow built a rubber-powered model that flew 600 meters before encountering an obstruction”. So, you ask yourself who are Henson and Stringfellow. Were they aviation pioneers?  Did they do something historic? And if so, what was it?