A few days ago, I wrote about Erich Hartmann's Black Tulip, and the comments quickly shifted to the F-104 Starfighter. So, here's the rest of his story after the war.

As a reminder, Hartmann served in Nazi Germany and is considered the greatest fighter pilot in history. This post is about what happened afterward.

"(1955) Homecoming"

He spent ten years in Soviet prison camps and was liberated in 1955. A year later, he joined the new West German Air Force.

"(1959–1962) JG 71 "Richthofen"

In June 6, 1959, he became the first commander of JG 71 in Ahlhorn, West Germany's first operational jet fighter wing, flying the Canadair Sabre. That's where the Sabre with the tulip logo from my previous post came from.

West Germany chose the Lockheed F-104G, a jet that Lockheed itself called "a missile with a man inside." Hartmann considered it unsafe. As early as 1957, he advised Luftwaffe chief Josef Kammhuber to buy only a few new aircraft and test them before ordering them in bulk.

Germany purchased 916 aircraft. In 1965 alone, 27 of them crashed. According to Bundeswehr estimates, a total of 269 aircraft crashed, and 116 German pilots were killed. The Germans called His "Witwenmacher," "The Widowmaker."

He wasn't the only critic. Werner Panitzki, a Luftwaffe inspector from 1962 to 1966, was fired after calling the purchase of the F-104 a purely political decision. Panitzki is also often quoted as calling Hartmann "a good pilot, but not a good officer," though I couldn't find the original source for that phrase.

"(1970) Fired"

Hartmann was promoted to Oberst in 1967, but in 1970, at the age of 48, he was forced into early retirement.

"(1971–1974) Return to the Roots"

He returned to where he started: training young pilots as a flight instructor at Hangelar, a small airfield near Bonn.

Someone in my last thread said Hartmann was an instructor at Their local airfield. Was it Hangelar?

And a question for the F-104 experts: was the problem with the aircraft itself or with how Germany used it?

I’ve been very fortunate to have been around the Avro Vulcan for the last 15 to 18 years, going back to the days when XH558 was at Bruntingthorpe. I was also lucky enough to see her final flight 11 years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit XH558 again and climb inside the cockpit.

Going back after all that time, either I’ve put on a bit of weight or the Vulcan is a lot more cramped inside than I remembered.

From the outside it looks absolutely enormous, but once you climb inside it’s a completely different story.

Former Vulcan Navigator Plotter Andy Marson described it to me as an “inverse TARDIS” huge on the outside and surprisingly small on the inside. Having climbed back inside, I can see exactly what he means.

The pilot and co-pilot sat at the front, with the Navigator Plotter, Navigator Radar and Air Electronics Officer behind them.

Some of the original equipment has now been removed from XH558, but Andy explained that when he flew on Vulcans, pretty much everything around the three rear crew positions was being used.

That really struck me. In the pre-digital age, the crew were working with all those separate instruments, switches, radar and navigation equipment around them.

Then you look forward at the pilot and co-pilot positions, sitting slightly higher up, and they don’t exactly look spacious either.

Andy joked that if you were a tall pilot sitting on the left-hand side, you could end up with your neck slightly crooked by the time you landed. Looking at the space they had, you can understand what he meant.

XH558 later had another interesting chapter in her history when she became one of six Vulcans converted to K2 tankers in 1982.

Three additional fuel tanks could be carried in the Vulcan’s huge bomb bay, and during my visit I was able to climb into the bomb bay and also see one of those large tanks outside the aircraft. It gives you a much better idea of the amount of space available.

A Hose Drum Unit was fitted at the rear of the aircraft to allow it to refuel other aircraft in flight.

I have a particular fondness for that part of the story because I worked on Victor tankers and serviced the Hose Drum Units on those aircraft, both the centreline and wing-mounted units.

So seeing the same basic refuelling system fitted to a Vulcan connected two very different parts of RAF history for me.

Going back inside XH558 after all these years made me look at the aircraft slightly differently. We tend to remember the Vulcan for its size, shape and unmistakable sound, but inside you start thinking much more about the people who had to operate all that equipment in such a confined space.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who flew or worked on Vulcans. What were they actually like operationally, particularly for the three crew members sitting in the rear?

According to the MACR (4802), they were last seen in the target area, and said on radio they were going to Switzerland. A French gendarme claims he saw an American plane in a place 20km south of Epinal on the same date. The plane was at 600 m altitude, dropped 9 bombs and kept flying towards Switzerland. If this was the missing plane, they lost 4000 meters altitude over 21 km distance, and must have been having trouble jettisoning bombs immediately.

However, some other sources claim the aircraft left the formation between Orleans and the English Channel, west of Paris. This is 200 km west of Epinal. (The flight route to and from target circled around Paris from the south.) Apparently it went for Switzerland, too, although it would be strange as it is 220 km from Orleans to Caen (i.e. the relative safety of English Channel) and it is almost 400 km to Switzerland. I found one website which said the B-24 crashed at Saint Lucien (85 km north of Orleans), but no more details or sources are given. If it was Saint Lucien, a very specific small village, why is the crew considered MIA?

Anyone who could help us confirm the crash site, and clarify the fate of the 11 crew?

If you're interested in Dutch Military Aviation, you may have hear of De Vliegende Hollander, the official magazine of the Royal Netherlands Air Force (KLu).

I have hundreds of issues that I've collected over the last 40 years. Before disposing of the collection, I went looking for a digital archive and was surprised by how little of the older material appeared to be available online. Rather than see these magazines disappear, I started scanning and preserving them myself.

I've uploaded close to 200 issues to the Internet Archive so far, and am roughly halfway through the project. My collection has coverage from the 1960s through the 2010s, until the magazine went online-only.

What makes the collection fascinating to me is that it documents far more than aircraft introductions. Across several decades it provides a first-hand view of how the Dutch Air Force evolved and saw itself at the time.

The magazines cover topics such as: introduction of major type (F-104, NF-5, F-16, helis, tankers, F-35), modernization programs and mid-life upgrades; training deployments (to Canada, the United States, Iceland and elsewhere), NATO exercises throughout the Cold War and beyond, operations in various theatres (Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan for instance), as well as base life, personnel stories and day-to-day service within the KLu.

In many ways they serve as a time capsule of Dutch military aviation history, Cold War NATO operations, and the changing priorities of the Royal Netherlands Air Force over more than half a century.

I've attached a few sample covers from different decades below.

The project is ongoing, and there are still hundreds more issues waiting to be scanned and uploaded. For those of you who are in checking it out: https://archive.org/details/@devliegendebrabander

slowly leaving 25R over R0 to Paris...only to turn around a little later and come back due to adverse winds ( june 11 2011 ) own content.

• Modelo: Lisunov Li-2 / Douglas C-47 (avión bimotor de hélice de la Segunda Guerra Mundial / posguerra).

• Ubicación de esta unidad: Región de Kaliningrado, cerca de Gúryevsk en Rusia.

• Estado: Se encuentra en estado de abandono expuesto a la intemperie tras haber sido retirado de un pedestal conmemorativo.

On Veterans Day, November 11th, 10 Good Men streams worldwide on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. It is fantastic. It took the crew three years of constant work to find these heroes, interview them, and produce this film to tell their final stories. I will post the trailers here next week!

Sharing in case others here have an interest

www.aviationhistoricalstudies.org

Photo by Horst Faas

On the dark battlefields of World War II, German soldiers feared an enemy they could barely see and rarely heard... until it was too late. Out of the blackness came a faint whooshing sound. Seconds later, bombs rained from the sky, buildings crumbled, and chaos erupted across the Eastern Front. On this episode of Weird History we take a look at the mysterious Night Witches: an elite squadron of all-female Soviet pilots who became one of the most feared forces of World War II. Flying outdated wooden biplanes on daring nighttime bombing missions, they terrorized German troops, earned countless military honors, and cemented their place among history's most legendary warriors. Have you ever heard of the Night Witches? Let us know in the comments.

(Much like real history, this video was produced entirely by human beings.)

Short S.45 Solent G-AHIU Solway and G-AKNS City of Liverpool up for scrapping Hamworthy Beach, Poole Harbour, England .Circa 1959