Following on from Part I and Part II we have come to my favorite era. The fumbling experiments are part of the past, the fundamentals of flight are well understood and the only limits are the imagination of mankind and the technological capabilities of the equipment. Progress is moving so fast that by the time a plane gets off the drawing board it may well be obsolete. Garish paint-jobs, innovative design ideas, SPATS! Plus the aircraft looked so darned COOL! What's not to love?
I'm grouping aircraft by type and in chronological order so that the reader can see the changes more easily. Click on the name of the aircraft to be taken to an article providing more details about the aircraft
BOMBERS
if this plane had shown up over a Western Front battlefield
I doubt anyone would have given it a second glance
despite its primitive looks it was a much more powerful aircraft
one of the first to be equipped with turbosuperchargers
much fuss is made about the HE-111 outrunning fighters during the Spanish Civil War
the B-10 was doing the same thing in 1932, outpacing almost all fighters then in service
certainly the ugly duckling of the late 30s bomber design
the B-18 fell short of the performance demanded by the US Air Corps
and it spent most of its career as a sub-hunter flying from stateside bases
Fighters
Glenn Curtiss was a mover-and-shaker in the early years of aircraft development in the USA he was early proponent of military aviation and the company he founded provided a long line of fighter aircraft all of which bore the name "hawk" in their titles (which were far cooler than their official designations)
to my mind this is simply the sexiest fighter ever made,
plus they flew out of Selfridge Air Base, right near my home
a more garish, "Come at me 'Bro", paint-scheme could not be conceived
almost as cool as a P-6E
the US Air Corps first monoplane fighter,
and a darned good-looking bird it was!
P-26s were employed by the Republican Chinese and Phillipine Air Forces
against Japan at the beginning of WW2
yes, another Curtiss fighter called Hawk, I warned you earlier
this is another favorite of mine, it just seems so elegant and clean
for a while in the 1930's autogyros were all the rage
Attack Aircraft
there is something that I have always liked about the outline of this plane,
perhaps its ancestry that includes the Gamma has something to do with it
Observation Aircraft
Support Aircraft
just look at those stylish landing gear!
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