Let Let Let - Warplanes

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The Ryan NYP ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ is the plane that gave Charles Lindbergh world-wide fame when he crossed the Atlantic ocean in a non-stop flight from New York to Paris on 20 May 1927. With this heroic flight he won the Orteg prize, established for the first man to make this non-stop [...]

When Anthony Fokker went into serious aviation business it became soon evident that there was no place for him in his homeland The Netherlands.

Johannisthal 1913 booklet
Instead he moved to Germany together with his old schoolfriend Frits Cremer and after some preliminary wandering he finally settled at Johannisthal near Berlin, at that time the ‘centre of [...]

Designed by a team headed by Pierre Satre, the Sud Est Caravelle was one of the most innovative and original jetliners of the fifties. With a nose section resembling that of the De Havilland Comet* it had the unique feature of engines mounted in pods at the rear end on each side of the fuselage. [...]

The Coventry Ordnance Works (C.O.W.) designed and built in 1915 a small 37 mm cannon capable of firing a 1 pound, and then later 1.5 pound high-explosive shell. Vickers had acquired in the early twenties the rights for this gun and after a proposal to the Air Staff a specification was issued to develop a [...]

In the mid-fifties the British aircraft industry produced a number of operational jet fighters with trans-sonic capabilities like the Hawker Hunter, Gloster Javelin, De Havilland Sea-Vixen and the Vickers-Supermarine Scimitar. During this time, a new generation of supersonic fighters and fighter-bombers was being developed with a number of various prototypes in [...]

This article gives an overview of the most important and significant flying boats and amphibians developed and built by the French aircraft industry. In fact France more or less ‘invented’ the flying boat with the Fabre Hydravion which was flown for the first time on 28 March 1910 from the harbour of [...]

When Germany capitulated in May 1945 and German troops left the Netherlands, there was not much left of the national aircraft industry. The Fokker works at Amsterdam-Noord were practically destroyed and any equipment still left was looted by the retreating German forces. Also the Fokker workshop at Schiphol-Airport was practically non-existing by that time. Much [...]

The idea of a convertiplane is not new. A combination of a helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft has been tried several times. However, such a convertiplane not only combines the advantages of both separate types, but also the disadvantages like higher costs, lower speed and range and less capacity! In spite of this a British [...]

ILA stands for ‘Internationale Luftfahrt Austellung’ (International Aviation Display) and is a one-week event held every two years. It was held from 27 May until 1 June 2008.

B-25 Mitchell in Red Bull markings
The last two days were used as Public Days with an airshow programme. At earlier years the ILA was at Hanover, but after [...]