The sky-high aircraft and aviation thread

Knowing India if the Taliban seem to be on the verge of taking over Pakistan they'll intervene and destroy Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. (Conventionally since no first use.)

They won't be taking any chances after what happened in Mumbai some years ago.

Air New Zealand shows off stunning, all-black Dreamliner.

Pretty plane....

Oh. Goody. I can hardly wait.

Dreamliner looks nice. Seems strange to have one not trailing huge clouds of blue and black smoke behind it though.

I was starting to think that high pitched shrieks of 'AAAAIIIEEE! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!' were actually what their engines sounded like...

That made me actually giggle aloud. Well done.

^^ You mean they don't sound like that?

Nah, it's from New Zealand so that one does it with an accent

Hey, FYI —if any of you has $800,000 to spend, you might be in the market for a reasonably well-preserved Me-109G license-built in Spain and last flown for the filming of the 1968 movie "The Battle of Britain".

Have been in storage for the past 45 years, recently "re-discovered".

In 1942 Spain signed an agreement with Messerschmidt AG in order to build Me-109G fighters with parts, diagrams and supplies provided by Germany. Of course, it became basically impossible to do so. But after the war Spain built many of those planes under the designation "HA-1112-M 1 L", ironically fitted with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines bought as war surplus in the late 1940s.

So, there you have it. A bunch of "almost" Me-109Gs in reasonable condition, that might even be made flyable again.

Any takers? ^.^

Relevant link: http://www.platinumfighters.com/#!ha-1112-m1l/c12zi

Not bad.

Just finished watching Tora!Tora!Tora! Fuck you, Michael Bay, that's how you film the attack on Pearl Harbor - tons of real planes, if not the real types due to no flyable Zeros, Kates, or Vals being available, and proper co-operation between American and Japanese film crews.

edited 11th Jul '14 11:11:10 AM by TamH70

I bet it's a royal pain in the ass to actually film combat scenes with real airplanes. You have to coordinate all of the stunt planes as well as the filming planes, without anyone actually crashing into each other. And Tora Tora Tora was made only 25 years after the war that the planes were all built for. Micheal Bay would have been dealing with planes nearing their 50th year.

What I always wondered about Bayharbor is how the Americans didn't spot the Japs coming with all the Kidd-class destroyers they had.

edited 11th Jul '14 4:34:01 PM by Achaemenid

The radars for them wouldn't be built for a few decades. Typical government procurement.

No, FDR had all the radars moved out of Pearl Harbor because he knew it was coming!

I still think that Tora! Tora! Tora! (bitch to type that out, so it is) was the best and most even handed depiction of what happened that day that's ever been put on celluloid. And also one of the best shot films ever made, especially DAT opening sequence with the Imperial Japanese Navy personnel on parade in their white uniforms set to Jerry Goldsmith's score. Some of the individual sequences were so daft as to be nothing other than completely accurate though - that scene with the flight instructor and her pupil in that yellow training aircraft being passed by seemingly every IJN aircraft in the world at the time being chief among them. The looks on the Japanese flight crews being just of curiosity at the gaijin sharing the sky with them was priceless.

I don't know what brand of coke Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer were smoking during the Baffleck effort's production but it must have been way below their usual standard.

I just wonder how a remake of the original would look like now thanks to releasing documents that were still deep in the black secret during the time of its production? And at least if they did a proper job of CGI, unlike Bay, they could show all six carriers that launched the attack having, as was true on teh real day, having different paint jobs for their aircraft - unlike in Tora! cubed which just ran with all of them having that of the Akagi.

Supposedly Micheal Bay wanted to do a historically accurate movie, but he got overruled. The Director of a film is often just the guy who gets hired to take the credit/blame for the studio's work.

Also, Tora Tora Tora is evidently the kind of movie that is hard to "get" if you don't already happen to know the history of the event, since there is zero character development for almost anyone present.

Character development can be over-rated, particularly if you end up with Twenty Minutes with Jerks. The characters of the Japanese contingent in particular were well drawn enough to know what they were, what their roles were, and how they would be going about it though. The guys who played Genda and Fuchida, in particular, nailed it. Though I didn't believe the character called "Gandhi" Kurishima was a real dude until I googled him just now. He's very darkly humourous in the film and I thought he was a composite character.

Yeah, looking back, it occurs to me that only the Japanese characters were developed at all as characters. The Americans were mostly just stock characters.

Probably the fault of the way the film was structured - Japanese acting, Americans reacting, and that's down to the director of the American half of the film.

Indeed, the two halves of the film were produced by two different teams (which worked very well since each team was working a different side of the story).

One thing I always regret about the handful of movies based around Pearl Harbor is that they give the impression that the USAAF's fighter force consisted entirely of Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, when older Curtiss P-36 Hawks also took part in the fighting. The US military's start-of-war kit is an interseting bit of history all by itself, as the US military, like everyone else with any capability to do so in 1940 and 1941, was very very rapidly expanding and modernizing their military and phasing old kit out of service.

Yeah, true. I also think that military aviation in America at that time was still adjusting to the fact that instead of court martialing Billy Mitchell, they should have made him Chief of Air Staff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

There were a lot of new types getting phased in, with the middle marks of the Fortress being among them.

Though if the war in Europe had ended with a German victory in '41, they would have had this to play with against the Japanese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-36

(that war was always coming)

The very early B-17s are just... weird. No tail gunner (indeed, nowhere in the tail to put him), and gun blisters on the sides, top, and bottom of the plane. Very much a 1930s design.

Those ventral "squat" gunners positions seem like they'd be almost useless just due to ergonomics alone. Not that the Ball Turret sounds like fun or anything.

But yeah, while we're talking about 1930's aviation, let's talk about Peashooter-chan◊. She hopes that B-17-sempai will notice her if she fights with tenacity and honor against the Japanese invaders.

I feel really bad for the two Japanese fighter pilots that got shot down by those things.

EDIT: Mitchell I think had some great ideas, but he was best utilized in history books rather than in actual leadership and decision making positions. This was a man who thought that the entire US Navy should be abolished and their funding given to the Army Air Forces because there's clearly no future in naval warfare.

edited 11th Jul '14 7:00:26 PM by AFP

There was no role for the battleship in naval warfare. That was his point. One Fuchida and Genda's men hammered home on 7/12.

He was right. There was a role for naval aviation, which he proved on a continual basis. That's what he got court-martialed for, after all. Saying that battleships that the US government had just authorized spending billions of today's dollars on were useless.

That plane is adorable though. And better than the RAF fighters of her era, which were mostly biplanes.

edited 11th Jul '14 7:09:07 PM by TamH70

Battleships continued to be useful through WWII, though their biggest contribution during the actual war tended to be as nigh indestructable Anti-Air platforms to protect the vulnerable carriers. Part of the reason they stayed in service into the 90s was that very few other surface warships could keep up with the carriers over long distances. Very powerful engines combined with very large fuel tanks.

It might have been a better investment to put that money towards more destroyers, cruisers, and carriers, but given that the US Navy commissioned something like 100+ aircraft carriers during WWII, they can hardly be accused of neglecting airpower. Plus, in 1941, nobody knew that, even the Japanese and British with their early carrier victories (the Brits, of course, having launched the first carrier raid in 1917).

All that said, didn't Billy Mitchell consider carriers to also be a waste of money?

Granted, he said that in 1924, when that was probably correct. See also Foch's quote about airplanes being a curiosity with no military use (he later had an aircraft carrier named for him some time after he changed his thoughts on the matter).

Mitchell predicted that all seapower was wasted military power, because land based bombers would easily be able to hunt them down and dispatch them at their liesure. This was ostensibly what the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed to do (a mission which it proved utterly inadequate for, at least when combined with USAAF heavy bomber doctrine of the time).

edited 11th Jul '14 7:44:19 PM by AFP

And this, Model Research, is how you lament the NACA and how you indirectly criticize NASA and still get it published by NASA!

But with more copper and zinc.