December 18, 2022
Today in Microsoft Flight Simulator, I’m flying the de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth, the airplane that trained thousands of pilots from across the British Empire to take to the air in World War II. Born in 1882, Geoffrey de Havilland was the second son of a village pastor. At an early age, he displayed a […]
December 17, 2022
Welcome to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, where today in Microsoft Flight Sim I will be flying the Junkers Ju 52, one of the world’s first modern airliners, which became an icon of the Nazi regime. Tempelhof was Berlin’s main airport from 1927 to the 1970s, and was a main site of the 1948 Berlin Airlift. I […]
December 17, 2022
Welcome to Munda, in the Solomon Islands, where I’ll be checking out the iconic the F4U-1 Corsair in its natural WW2 habitat, in Microsoft Flight Simulator. As some of you may recall, I’ve actually been to Munda, where I did an extensive post on the World War II campaign there and at nearby Guadalcanal. Now […]
December 16, 2022
Part 2: Attempts at Reconciliation (May 5 – May 19) May 5, 1989 – China was mainly quiet in the wake of the large marches in multiple cities the day before, to commemorate the May 4th Movement of 1919. Western newspapers, including the New York Times, reported on the previous day’s protests. May 6, 1989 […]
December 16, 2022
I just read to my 8-year old twin daughters about an exceptional person I never heard of before: Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot, and the first Native American pilot. Bessie was born in 1892 to a family of sharecroppers in Texas. Her family was part Cherokee. She walked four miles every day to […]
December 16, 2022
In the spring of 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Protests, I began a project of live-tweeting the events and images of the protests and crackdown, day by day, moment by moment. The tweets that followed, over the next month and half, provide an interesting sense of how events ebbed and flowed […]
December 15, 2022
Today on Microsoft Flight Simulator, I’m at Homey Airport (KXTA), aka Groom Lake, aka Area 51. I’ve come here, to the remote Nevada desert, to fly one of the most iconic top secret aircraft of all time: the F-117 Nighthawk, commonly called the Stealth Fighter. The story of the F-117 begins in 1964, when the […]
December 15, 2022
Welcome back. Today in Microsoft Flight Sim, I’ll be flying the twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning, one of the fastest and most successful American fighters of World War II. n the process, I’ll be telling the story of Dick Bong, a P-38 pilot in the Pacific who became the top-scoring American fighter ace of all time. […]
December 15, 2022
Welcome to Courmelles Aerodrome, on the southwest outskirts of Soissons, for a tour of the French “Aisne Sector” of the Western Front today in MSFS, in the Dorand AR.1. The Dorand AR.1 is a two-seat observation biplane (the AR stands for Avion de Reconnaissance) developed in 1916, in response to the newer, deadlier fighter planes […]
December 15, 2022
Today in Microsoft Flight Sim I’m going to be flying the Nieuport 17, one of the premier French fighter planes of the First World War. Introduced in early 1916, the Nieuport 17 was the first French plane to make use of the German-invented synchronized machine gun, timed to shoot through the blade of the propeller […]