Aeroplane Monthly - March 2016

NEWS AND COMMENT

NEWS
• Ex-MacArthur C-121 back in the air
• Lottery grant for DHMuseum
• Zero airborne in Japan
• Tracey Curtis-Taylor reaches ‘Oz’
• Combat veteran P-40 flies again
• Testbeds to get Cosford airing
• Ex-FAA Reliant arrives in Wiltshire … and the month’s other top aircraft preservation news

HANGAR TALK
Steve Slater’s monthly comment column on the historic aircraft world

REGULARS

SKYWRITERS

Q
Your questions asked and answered

AIRCREW
The Mosquito crews of Canadian survey operator Spartan Aerial Services worked in a tough operating environment

BOOKS

COLD WAR
Seventy years on from Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, we recall some fascinating aspects of the years of East-West confrontation

RAF WASHINGTONS
A tour on Bomber Command’s pre-jet stopgap

Tu-104s IN LONDON
Newly-declassified material helps tell the story of the first Soviet jet visits to Britain

US ‘PERIPHERAL’ ELINT AND SIGINT
The innocuous-looking ‘transports’ that gathered vital intelligence around the boundaries of the Iron Curtain

NUCLEAR F-105s
The ‘Thud’s’ nuclear strike role in the European theatre

FROM ‘V-FORCE’ TO CND
The fascinating career of Air Cdre Alastair Mackie CBE DFC and Bar

RAF RADIO PROVING FLIGHTS
A deliberately euphemistic name for some very secret missions. We look back to No 51 Squadron’s operational work in 1967

BERLIN CORRIDOR DEFENDERS
Training to protect Allied rights of access to the divided city

FEATURES

NEW BOSS AT THE BBMF
An interview with Sqn Ldr Andy Millikin as he prepares for his first season as commanding officer of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight

HYTHE GUN CAMERA
An innovative approach to First WorldWar armament training — and a story laced with personal tragedy

‘HIGH FLIGHT’ SPITFIRE
Identifying a 1950s film ‘extra’

AEROPLANE MEETS… WALTER EICHHORN
The extrovert German warbird pilot, still displaying at nearly 80

DATABASE: FOKKER G.I
Joop Wenstedt tells the story of the Dutch manufacturer’s last fighter

JUNKERS W33 BREMEN
Two Germans and an Irishman made the world’s first east-west aerial crossing of the Atlantic