• High Flight

This short movie was created using the marvelous IL2 1946 flight simulator. I offer it as a small token of appreciation (and envy) to the men and women that flew the Supermarine Spitfire.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

• Vmc demo gone wrong

Interesting story about spinning a B-25 --> here.

In the category of "been there done that"—in a Baron, not a B-25—I know the feeling. My instructor was demonstrating Vmc and stalled in the process, the same as happened in the referenced story. At the time I didn't realize he'd done it unintentionally, and—from lack of experience—I didn't realize ehwas trying to kill us.

For the last few years I’ve flying fam and training hops in a C-45 for the FAA. Vmc is well above stall speed, as it is in the B-25, and there’s no excuse for departing the aircraft with one engine pulled back.

But out of curiosity, I tried yanking an engine in a B-25, below Vmc, using a simulator I fly, IL2. (It has the best flight physics of any sim I’ve flown, BTW. If you're inclined to such pastimes, I highly recommend it.)

Same setup as the story: dirty stall, cleaned her up, then chopped the power on the right side. She did spin, and did go over on her back— which if you think about is exactly what you’d expect. One wing is moving faster, thanks to the yaw, so it has more lift and over ya go.

But unlike Hennessy’s account I didn’t have any trouble recovering in the sim—unless I had a notch of flaps. Then I couldn’t stop the rotation or break the stall. The spin went real flat, but power on the opposite engine did help, after a fashion. However, as in the story, it did go back into a spin the opposite direction. I’m guessing the flaps blanket the rudders and elevator creating the loss of control.

I started the dirty simulation in the B-25 at 9,000 feet, and eventually crashed in the ocean. Tried it again retracting the flaps after 3 rotations, and recovered at 5,000.

I’m guessing that in Hennessey’s case someone looked to see if the bird was clean, realized it wasn’t, and sucked up the remaining flaps.

As wonderful as IL2 is, and as many hours of fun as I’ve had with it, I won’t claim it’s a 100% faithful model of the dozens of WW2 aircraft. But I got to fly a ‘51 yesterday:

Tried it online today and it's surprisingly close to the exprience if far less sensual. The real one feels like a .45--hard, pure function, and loud. The sim is more visual than visceral.

• Your mission for today

September eleven is about as far back in history now as World War Two was when, as a kid, I began to understand the stories I heard from my Dad about heroism in the skies of the Pacific and Europe.


Imprinted with tales of low level missions in the Pacific and images of 1000 plane raids over aircraft plants in Germany, I'm still thrilled by moments captured on film of fighters slicing through formations, just as I'm horrified by bombers (and those same fighters) going down in flames as crewmen, mere specks, tumble out to parachute into an uncertain future.

Movies such as Twelve O'Clock High and Memphis Belle allowed me to fly along, at least vicariously, on those missions and understand, in a small way, the human toll of such events. I always wondered what it was like to be part of the action. I now know, at least in a virtual way.

Thanks to modern personal computers and an amazing piece of software called IL2 1946 I now appreciate, at least a little, the feeling when someone calls, "Flak ahead boys," or "Fighters, two o'clock!"


Its 1943 and the US Army Air Forces bombing campaigns over Germany are at a peak. Large formations of bombers attack targets inside Germany almost daily in broad daylight. My mission was as the pilot (I could have been a bombardier or gunner) of a B-25, part of a 36 plane formation at 15,000 feet on the way to attack a factory in Berlin.



I could also have chosen to fly an Me-109 or FW-190 and try to prevent the inevitable.


The mission started with a long period of nervous boredom and concentration trying to stay in formation. Droning along I watched checkpoints--a road here, a bridge there--pass under us. Checked against the chart, it seemed we'd never get there; but, knowing what was ahead, getting there quicker wasn't necessarily better. Then we heard the fighter call, and our escorts peeled off to attack the first wave of Luftwaffe planes.


Early Mustangs, P-51Bs, they stayed with us as long as they could before, low on fuel, they had to return to England. After that, we were on our own till our little friends rejoined us on the way back. And the Luftwaffe knew it. Soon more enemy fighters were on us, and we started to lose bombers.

"Blue six is going down. We're bailing out. Tell my wife I love her, willya Joey?"

Then suddenly the fighters are gone, and we knew what that meant. As if by magic, gray lethal cotton balls appear in the sky. When one materializes close to our right, the aircraft bucks, the controls shake, and I hear shrapnel hitting the aircraft. Check the gauges. Oil pressure is going down and oil temp is going up on #2. Throttle to idle, mixture to cut-off, prop feather. With our load of fuel and four 500 pound bombs we start to lose altitude.

Press on, or salvo them now and head home? We're here to do a job, and we didn't get the worst of it, so we press on.


Hit a function key and the scene switches to a factory in Berlin. As we survey the quiet neighborhood from the ramp of a Messerschmidt factory, air raid sirens begin to blare. Hit the key again and we switch scenes to an anti-aircraft crew as it swings into action. Look up, and through breaks in the clouds tiny specs in formation pass over. In a disorienting moment I realize I'm looking at myself, their target, fly over.

The emotional swing is real . . . bomb the bastards or shoot down the murderers. It just depends which side your on. Suspension of disbelief is easy. It's exciting, interesting, and disturbing to experience both sides of the action--to have an inkling of what it must have been like for those heroes from both sides that put their lives on the line in the 1940s.