This is NOT a question grounded in any kind of reality, it’s a purely hypothetical question. What if there was a restorable airframe, and if a suitable power plant could be found, and if there was the funding, facilities, expertise and willingness to restore any WW2 era...
The Battle of Agincourt Museum, or le ‘Centre Azincourt 1415’ as it is officially named, was redesigned, expanded and improved, a couple of years ago. It is now a centre of discovery and learning for all age groups with a mission to explain the background and events...
In October last year I wrote a post speculating where Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg might shoot the airfield scenes for their new WW2 mini series, ‘Masters of the Air’. Since then I’ve been updating it as new bits of information come in, but that makes it...
Filming starts next month on the next big-budget war movie, Devotion, which tells the real life story of U.S. Navy pilots Tom Hudner and Jesse Brown. The History The duo came from completely different, post-World War II, backgrounds. Tom was a white New Englander from a wealthy...
Many people know that President Kennedy’s elder brother died tragically during World War II, in a colossal airborne explosion over East Anglia in the UK on 12 Aug 1944. Not many, including myself, knew that the event was witnessed by Col. Elliott Roosevelt, son of FDR who...
The Historic Vehicle Association (HVA) has announced the 27th and 28th vehicles to be added to the National Historic Vehicle Register. The HVA established the National Historic Vehicle Register in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Heritage Documentation Programs and Library of Congress, respectively, to...
Guédelon is a 13th century castle under construction from scratch using only medieval tools, materials and techniques. It is a fascinating project in experimental archaeology that began in 1995 – a quarter century ago! Construction began two years later* in a former quarry in the middle of...
When the US 101st Airborne* were besieged in Bastogne during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in Dec 1944, they were re-supplied from the air, not just by parachute but by gliders too. Until Dr Peter Caddick-Adams mentioned it in his excellent online lecture** on ‘The Battle of...
I came across this little ‘factoid’ in the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s in-house magazine, Scuttlebutt, which was a fascinating publication until they stopped publishing it! It’s one of those ‘unknown unknowns’ as Donald Rumsfeld would say. I didn’t know that I didn’t know it… until...
You’ve gotta love it! What a spectacular piece of engineering the Napier Sabre is! At least, what a spectacular engineering concept. Sadly its early iterations at the start of WW2 weren’t always the finest examples of engineering quality control when they went into production. So they weren’t...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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