At their most essential, they are wooden or tubular alloy skeletons wrapped in paper-thin fabric or sheet-metal skins—riveted tin cans powered by internal combustion engines, driven by propellers and flown on a wing and a prayer.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
Given a choice between bailing out into the frigid waters of the Engtlish Channel or nursing his dying aircraft for as far as he could take it, Douglas Gordon chose what he saw as the lesser evil—and it may well have saved his life.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
If the Germans didn’t get you, the Typhoon just might. Flying Officer Douglas Gordon knew it only too well. Between June and August 1944, 19 Allied squadrons—his own among them—lost hundreds of the hulking aircraft and 150 pilots, many of them due to engine or structural failure. “She was a monster; she was just a real miserable aircraft,” said Gordon, who survived 99 combat missions at the stick of the Hawker-built plane.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
