Knights Without Parachutes — logistics and maintenance

If you get the chance to visit the VAFM in person, your first priority should be to get a tour from Andy Parks; there's nobody else in the world with his knowledge of the people in the collection as well as personal experience of aviation and with building WWI replicas. But after that, talk to some of the mechanics and ask them how they build WWI airplanes with the materials, fuels, and regulations of a century later. 

Mike Gugeler on WWI aircraft maintenance Mike Gugeler is one of the rare people who, like Vintage Aero Flying Museum director Andy Parks, knows not only WWI aviation history, but also how to fly and how to build WWI replica airplanes. He is the sort of person who at a WWI aviation museum fly-in would be the one spreading out blueprints for WWI airplanes on the tables set out for lunch.  Eddie Rickenbacker thought that pilots should be recruited from racecar drivers, since they were already adrenaline junkies (all right, it's not how he phrased it) who understood machines. (The US Army disagreed,...

The Supply Chain Behind Fighter Pilots One of our readers - thank you! - sent us a very interesting article on what airpower did to the conduct of war. (Moved it into the third dimension, for one thing.) While many of the war's fascinating stories are from the fighter pilots, there was (and is!) much more to air power than that, and the numbers tell their own amazing stories. The fighter pilots were actually in a perfect position to see the importance of maintenance, logistics, and supply. Modern Warfare, Aviation, and Supply Interesting points from the article (The Genesis of Modern Warfare:...