Originally designed as a cargo and paratroop transport during World War II, the Fairchild C-82 Packet is today mainly remembered for its starring role in the Hollywood film The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Its ungainly appearance earned it the nickname "the flying boxcar" but the aircraft was the first to achieve practical end-loading and aerial delivery of cargoes. Its outsized capacity served the U.S. military's needs for more than ten years--civilian operators flew it in remot...

This book is a collection of fascinating short stories, photos, and documents furnished by the heroic and courageous men that served as air or ground crew members in Vietnam. The chopper units were located throughout Vietnam. During the course of the war, we lost at least 5,139 helicopter air crew members and at least 588 ground support crew members. In fact, the true number of helicopter air and ground crew members killed or missing in action will probably never be known. Those crew membe...

When Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, she was flying the longest leg of her around-the-world flight and was only days away from completing her journey. Her plane was never found, and for more than sixty years rumors have persisted about what happened to her.Now, with the recent discovery of long-lost radio messages from Earhart's final flight, we can say with confidence that she ran out of gas just short of her destination of Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. From the ...

Official navy historian John Sherwood offers an authoritative social history of the air war, focused around fourteen of these aviators—from legends like Robin Olds, Steve Ritchie, and John Nichols to lesser-known but equally heroic fighters like Roger Lerseth and Ted Sienecki.The war in the skies above Vietnam still stands as the longest our nation has ever fought. For fourteen years American pilots dropped bombs on the Southeast Asian countryside—eventually more t...

We could call this book “Special Operations Recon Mission Impossible.” A small group of highly trained, resourceful US Special Forces (SF) men is asked to go in teams behind the enemy lines to gather intelligence on the North Vietnamese Army units that had infiltrated through Laos and Cambodia down the Ho Chi Minh trails to their secret bases inside the Cambodian border west of South Vietnam. The covert reconnaissance teams, of only two or three SF men with four or five experienced indigen...

Juan Trippe, the first and last aviation tycoon in history, learned to fly in the rickety machines of World War I, when the sky appealed only to daredevils, and his life expectancy could have been counted, probably, in days. He was as star struck as any of the other young aviators of the day, but he was also a Yale educated banker's son who believed the world was crying out for air travel but didn't yet know it, and he thought he saw a way to turn this risky game into a business. At 25 he ...

"If you only have room in your collection for one book on WWII-era warbird wreck histories and recoveries, then it should be this one. . . . Fascinating." —Alan Griffith, author of Consolidated MessAviation historian Nicholas A. Veronico has been investigating and writing about aircraft wrecks for many years. His website, wreckchasing.com, is the go-to source for enthusiasts who want to know more about how to locate vintage airplane wrecks and then tell the...

The first Australians committed to serve in Viet Nam were a group of military instructors known as the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. Their initial role: to assist in the training of the ground forces of South Viet Nam. But battalion battles and artillery duels, the relief of besieged camps, and mobile strike forces became part of the mosaic that saw this curiously named unit forge a distinct chapter in Australia's military history. The Men Who Persevered is the story of t...

Prior to 1979, you probably hadnt heard of counterterrorism or Special Operations. Even so, special warriors have been around since Moses sent Joshua to spy out the land of Canaan. In 1986, Colonel Billy R. Wood served as the operations officer of the newly organized 45th Aviation Battalion (Special Operations). This unit was highly classified. The special operations training and missions carried out by the team were conducted in secret, and members couldnt even tell their wives and famili...

The events in Jet Age Man took place during the early Cold War, an era that will go down as a period when civilization teetered on the edge of the abyss. To some, nuclear deterrence appeared as utter madness, and was in fact commonly referred to as M.A.D. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction provoked protests and marches, and the architect of M.A.D, General Curtis LeMay, became a symbol of madness himself.Raised during those turbulent times, most contemporary historians conc...

James Jim Davis lived what he considered an impossible dream as he piloted a B-24, as part of the 8th Air Force, on nearly thirty missions in the European Theatre during World War II. In this memoir, Davis offers heart-wrenching detail concerning the difficulties of qualifying for the U.S. Army Air Forces pilot program, the strenuous nature of the pilot training program, the anxiety caused by a wartime marriage, and the dangers of flying combat missions over Nazi Germany. Few, if any, othe...

This aviation handbook is intended to provide the reader with a quick reference to identify military support aircraft flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Canadian Army during the Second World War. The handbooks in this series include a general description and a photograph from the Canadian Forces Archives of at least one of the key variants or marks of each aircraft that has been in Canadian military service or used by Canadian servicemen overseas.