Lt. Cmdr. Bruce F. De Wald
U.S. Navy (ret.)

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Tuskegee Airmen

I hold a commercial pilot rating and have logged more than 1,200 hours. This past week one of my co-workers struck up a conversation about how he’d like to learn to fly. I told him I’d pick up some material for him to look at.

When I passed a newsstand looking for a couple of flying magazines to pass on to him, what did I see but the March issue of Aviation History featuring an article on one of the Tuskegee Airmen, Charles McGee. Well, I had to pick up that issue. First, I am a graduate of Tuskegee University (when it was Tuskegee Institute). Second, I started my flying career there at Moton Field. Third, I took flying lessons from Charles “Chief”Anderson, one of the civilian flight instructors contracted to train the Tuskegee pilots.

Your readers should know that it was he who flew Eleanor Roosevelt, not the character portrayed by Lawrence Fishburne in the HBO movie. Anyway, I enjoyed the article, and I would encourage any aviation enthusiast who has a chance to meet and talk with any of the Tuskegee Airmen to please do so. They are a very special part of aviation history.

Amoti Nyabongo
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Jack Broughton’s F-84

Thank you for publishing the article on Jack Broughton in your March issue (the “Art of Flight” department, authored by artist Mike Machat). I have always admired him and am the proud owner of both his books, Thud Ridge and Going Downtown. I was impressed with Mike Machat’s painting and hope to be able to get a print sometime.

I thought your readers might want to know that Broughton’s Republic F-84 is on display at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Ariz.

Michael R. Howell
Vancouver, Wash.

Support for Dioramas

I was delighted to read the editorial in your March issue. Those of us who are aviation purists may enjoy seeing airplanes in their sterile sitting-on-a-concrete-pad environment, but the not-so-aviation-oriented family may find them really boring.

In my opinion, the “contextual type of display,” showing an aircraft in a full-size diorama, greatly extends the value of an exhibit. I hope the expansion of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles International Airport, which is scheduled to open in 2003, will contain such exhibits.

I want to bring to your attention Fantasy of Flight, between Orlando and Tampa, Fla. Some who have visited this interesting exhibit have called it a little bit “too Disney,” but I disagree. Their diorama is centered on a Boeing B-17 in the setting of a World War II base in England on a winter night, with the ground crew changing an engine. The combination of the aircraft and crewmen, surrounded by tools, gives a living quality to the exhibit on a magnificent airplane.

When you enter the fuselage and go forward to the bomb bay, you see the doors open and the bombs falling to the landscape below, accompanied by the sound and feel of the rushing slipstream. Go forward to the cockpit and you hear the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot about a failing engine, including the query: “Do you think we’ll make it to the English coast, sir?”

Topping my excitement about your March issue is the article “The Flying Porcupine Earns Its Name.” Outside the hanger at Fantasy of Flight is a Short S.25 Sandringham, the civilian sibling of the Short Sunderland flying boat described in the article, sitting on landing gear designed for land operation. That aircraft is still flyable, and I understand it was flown to its new home at Fantasy of Flight, but I did not have the pleasure of seeing it get off the ground.

Keep up the good work making aviation history available to us who don’t have time to search through archives.

R. Nevin Rupp
Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas

Flying Boats Live On

I thoroughly enjoyed the story of the Short Sunderland “Flying Porcupine” (March 1999) and the sidebar about Short’s civilian flying boats. The Western Aerospace Museum has a Short Solent that is available for a tour of its flight station and the interior, which is in its original passenger-carrying configuration. I believe that it is the only one of its kind in the United States.

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