Stephan Wilkinson

Mar 13, 2024 | historynet.com | Brian Walker |Stephan Wilkinson

The Curtiss-Wright Corporation came into being in 1929 through the merger of companies started by pioneering aviators Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers. Within the new company, the Curtiss-Wright airplane division made airplanes while the Wright Aeronautical Corporation focused on engines. By the time of World War II, Curtiss-Wright held more defense contracts than any organization other than vastly larger General Motors and had become something of a bully.

Feb 2, 2024 | historynet.com | Tom Huntington |Stephan Wilkinson

Donald L. Miller’s massive book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany came out in 2007 and provided the basis for the new series on AppleTV+. In 2019 Aviation History had contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson look back at the then 12-year-old book in light of the announcement that HBO was going to turn it into a series.

Nov 15, 2023 | historynet.com | Stephan Wilkinson

The Boeing Stratocruiser was the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. Passengers loved it, but it still failed as a commercial transport. Its mainline service career lasted only a decade, thanks to the one-two punch of eye-watering operating costs and the arrival of the more efficient Boeing 707. It didn’t help that the Stratocruisers’ high-tech propellers often tore themselves loose from the engines, leaving the worldwide fleet with a stupefying accident record.

Aug 16, 2023 | historynet.com | Stephan Wilkinson

Roald Dahl was not an admirer of the Gloster Gladiator. “They have taut canvas wings, covered with magnificently inflammable dope, and underneath there are hundreds of small thin sticks, the kind you put under the logs for kindling, only these are drier and thinner,” wrote Dahl, the British novelist and short-story writer, creator of Willy Wonka and a Gloster Gladiator pilot himself.

May 25, 2023 | hvmag.com | Stephan Wilkinson

There was a time when the flatlands of the Hudson Valley were sprinkled with small airports, a profusion nearly matching the number of shopping malls that exist in their wake today. A few of these fields date back to the dawn of aviation. Many bloomed in the wake of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo transatlantic flight. And some flourished during the brief post-World War II private-flying boom, when pilots came back from battle determined to turn their wartime skills into careers.