Naval Aviation history you probably never knew about…In 1978, while in port at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, some folks from RVAH-1 “captured” a 1963 Plymouth Fury and brought it back on board the USS Enterprise, CVN-65. The Sailors marked up the Fury to represent the Squadron and the ship. Then when they…
Category: Aviation
Life at Area 51 in the 1960s
I came across this in an aviation group somewhere, previously shared on Facebook by Thornton “TD” Barnes, who worked at the facility for a period of time. He’s also got a website with his bio and pictures from his career with the Army, NASA, Atomic projects and business ventures in oil. More unclassified frivolity that…
Wisdom by Chuck Yeager
One of my favorite quotes by Chuck Yeager is “It’s the man, not the machine” which is in reference to dogfighting in an aircraft. This of course is meant to say that someone with a superior fighter plane could still be taken down by someone with an inferior one; that it is the operator in…
RIP General Chuck Yeager
The man, the legend… Chuck Yeager has left us. He was an ace in WWII (“Ace in a day” in fact, downing 5 aircraft in a single mission), he was the first to shoot down a German Me-262 jet fighter in his propeller-driven P-51 Mustang, he was the first man to break the sound barrier…
The First SR-71 over North Korea
I came across this interesting little story posted by Linda Sheffield in her “Habubrats” group online: A few paragraphs from my father’s (Col. Richard “Butch” Sheffield) unpublished book.North Korea, November 22, 1969, SR-71 number, 972First SR to overfly North Korea and first to land in South Korea.Some years later General Minter told me that this…