A Brief History On September 29, 1940, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) experienced the most astounding incident of airplanes colliding in mid-air, becoming locked together, and then safely landing. Incredibly, no crew member of either plane was killed! Digging Deeper At the RAAF No. 2 Service Flying Training School at Station Forest Hill, New South Wales, Australia (near Wagga Wagga if that helps), pilots and navigators learned to fly CAC Wirraway (single engine) and Avro Anson (twin engine) airplanes. The Anson was a derivation of the Avro 652 airliner, that served as a general purpose airplane before and during…
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A Brief History On September 25, 1911, the French battleship, Liberté, joined the long, sad list of ships that managed to sink themselves without the benefit of an enemy to blame when she blew up while moored at Toulon harbor in the South of France. Digging Deeper Liberté was a pre-Dreadnaught type battleship, built in 1902 to 1908, already obsolete at her 1908 commissioning because of the revolutionary appearance of the British battleship HMS Dreadnaught in 1906. Still, the Liberté was an impressive ship with a displacement of nearly 15,000 tons and a length of 439 feet. Capable of 19…
A Brief History On September 23, 1917, Imperial Germany lost one of its greatest flying aces when Leutnant Werner Voss was shot down and killed over West Flanders, outnumbered 8 to 1 and refusing to run! With 48 confirmed aerial kills, Voss was the fifth highest scoring German ace of World War I despite having a flying career that lasted less than 2 years. Digging Deeper The British opponents flying against Voss called him “The Bravest of German Pilots,” a moniker justified by the famous last flight of Voss when incredulous British pilots were stunned to have Voss repeatedly attack…
A Brief History On September 21, 1964, the XB-70 Valkyrie made its maiden flight at Palmdale, California. The world’s first Mach 3 bomber, the Valkyrie was designed to outrace Soviet interceptors and drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union with impunity. As it turned out, this concept became obsolete before the Valkyrie could be produced, and therefore it was not produced, saving US taxpayers a ton of money. On previous September 7th’s we ran articles 10 Underperforming Weapons, 5 More Underperforming Weapons and Another 5 Underperforming Weapons. On May 15th we featured an article on 10 Weapons and Weapon Systems…
A Brief History On September 17, 1939, only a couple weeks after World War II in Europe began, the German U-boat, U-29, sunk the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous with two of the three torpedoes fired striking the unlucky carrier. Courageous sank with 519 of her crew going down, becoming the first aircraft carrier ever sunk by a submarine. Here we list all the aircraft carriers ever sunk in combat by submarines, a dangerous prey as carriers are inevitably well protected by escorting ships. Note that no aircraft carrier has been sunk in combat from any source since the end…