Makes me wonder.. can you barrel roll a DC-3?

Maybe I’m not in on the joke (“…I’ll get me coat…”) but of course you can barrel roll anything. Done properly, it’s a 1G maneuver.

Remind me again why air shows and low-altitude stunting are a good idea? I understand that the party line is that “thousands of people get excited by aviation” when they come to the shows.

But where is the line about “millions of televiewers and newspaper readers are horrified by ‘little airplanes’ when they see the inevitable accidents broadcast or on the front page”?

First air show I ever went to–Reading, Pennsylvania in the late ’60s, as a young Flying Magazine editor–I had a privileged photographer’s position outside the flight-line ropes that gave me the bonus of watching a well-known flying farmer crazy-flying act in a J3 hit the ground vertically 50 feet in front of me. the pilot’s stick had come out of its socket on the downline of a low-altitude loop. I remember it sounded like a large watermelon that had been dropped out of a 10-story building. And his son was doing the PA commentary for the act…

Could be about an al Qaeda guy…or a 1950s Yank tank.

It could still do 420 knots, according to German Wikipedia (Vikipedia?).

A Spitfire that could do 482 mph??? Why does anybody still believe anything but the most elementary facts that Wikipedia posts? The best info I get from Wikipedia is when I click on the tab at the top that says “talk.” Then you get the behind-the-scenes arguments by all the people who actually know what they’re talking about but don’t have the time, knowledge or desire to go through the Wikipedia posting and editing process.

All that Wikipedia wants is “a citation.” Whether the citation is right or wrong doesn’t seem to matter. If it’s in print somewhere, it’s correct. If you say, “But I was there, I saw exactly what happened that day, I talked to the test pilot, in fact he was my father,” Wikipedia will respond, “but do you have a citation?”

Wikipedia is the single largest myth-propagating facility on the planet, since every subsidiary site simply copies whatever they have posted, myths and all. I can’t tell you how much aviation buehlchit I’ve found on Wikipedia while doing research for the aviation-history articles I write.

But do I have a citation? Actually, no.

I’m still waiting for the full length feature films of ” The American Invasion of Granada…”

Hey, at least we can spell. Granada is in Andalusia. Grenada (“Gruh-NAY-duh”) is in the Caribbean.

We’d probably have been better off invading Spain, admittedly.

Nope, 135.

Somebody who’s more of a Super cub rivet-counter than I am will have to come up with the ID as to whether it’s a -105, -125, -135, -150, or even -180 Super Cub, though…meanwhile, I’ll try to find out.

And wasn’t their CO the first black man to attend West Point? I do remember reading that he was a strict disciplinarian and spent his whole time at West Point being completely blanked by all the other (white) cadets.

Benjamin Davis Jr. spent four years at West Point (I’m sitting five miles from the Academy right now) without a single cadet speaking a word to him other than what was necessitated by duty.

But he wasn’t the first. Henry Flipper, a black, graduated in 1877. And nobody spoke to him for four years either.