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Just when I think I might know something about women in aviation, or just when we think we’ve heard all the stories about “the greatest generation,” I find out about another group who contributed to the World War II effort. They were not Rosie the Riveters assembling aircraft on production lines nor were they the pilots known as the WASP. By now, most people have heard of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, 1,074 civilian women who, from 1943 to 1944, flew more than 60 million miles ferrying military aircraft, towing targets, and performing other administrative flying duties for the US Army Air Forces.
In a recent post, Tom Paone described the plans of William Powell, a resident of Mobile, Alabama, for a Confederate helicopter. In fact, Powell’s scheme was only the tip of the iceberg. In researching a scholarly paper on Civil War Planes, I have catalogued a score of plans for powered flying machines developed on both sides of the battle lines. Perhaps the most interesting of these was the work of Colonel Edward Wellman Serrell , a professional engineer serving with the Union Army of the James in 1864. Inspired by the well-known hand-held helicopter toy, Serrell had begun studying aeronautics several years before the War.
The seventy-fifth anniversary of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, stirred up considerable media attention – particularly in light of another expedition to the South Pacific in the hopes of solving the mystery. While the fate of Earhart has enthralled the public since 1937, the story of how Earhart figures into the larger history of air navigation and long-distance flying is often overlooked.
As my colleague Dr. Tom Crouch referenced in a previous post, our nation is currently in the midst of commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War (or sesquicentennial for you Latin fans).
On January 10, 2012, the National Air and Space Museum Archives Department officially opened its new reading room at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center to public researchers. We welcomed six researchers that day, including two who had scheduled a trip from Germany to coincide with our grand opening.
No question 2012 will be remembered as a simultaneously joyous and tumultuous year, certainly in politics but also in air and space. As a retrospective of the year just gone, here are my five most significant events in air and space. Like all such lists, it is idiosyncratic and I recognize that others might choose different events. I list them in order of their occurrence—not according to their significance—during the year, along with my reason for including them on this list.
The good girls and boys of the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn get a visit from Santa, December 1944.
This September, Larry Crumpler, a research colleague at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, and I were able to fly in the back seats of two weight-shifting ultralight aircraft during a two-hour flight over the McCartys lava flow in central New Mexico.
Suitably clad in a custom-made flying suit and sporting a pair of goggles, President Warren G. Harding's 1921 Thanksgiving turkey, the gift of the Harding Girls' Club of Chicago, arrives at the College Park (Maryland) airport on a DH-4 mailplane.
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay is one of the National Air and Space Museum’s most heralded artifacts, but a new addition to the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division’s collections provides a glimpse into the lives of the crew before they became worldwide names. In May, the Archives accepted an accession of three State of Utah individual liquor permits for 1944 to 1945 (Acc. No. 2012-0027).