You may know the story of the three Martin Ocean Transport Model-130s (M-130) purchased by Pan Am Airways in 1935, but how about the lone model 156?  Hopefully, this new accounting of the “Super Clipper”  will be the most detailed to date thanks to information gleaned from old Soviet materials of Aeroflot airways. On April…

On this day in 1937, aviation pioneer Glenn Martin, who built the China Clipper class M-130 flying boats, retraced his 1912 flight plan twenty five years earlier in a self-built seaplane from Newport Bay California thirty four miles to Avalon on Catalina Island. Doing so broke the earlier English Channel record for an over-water flight…

You may think I’m seeing something just because I want to, or perhaps my vision is starting to fail, or maybe that I could be just a bit crazy.  So how about helping my tired eyes look over the following images and “see” if you can “see” what I’m “seeing.” The photo above is from…

Every now and then the Internet still manages to surprise me.  This week I purchased an image that was apparently lodged in someones personal photo album from the late 1930’s of a vacation to Hawaii and wouldn’t you know, right next to grandma was the Hawaii Clipper.  I have long believed that I had seen…

Ever wonder what a Martin M-130 Flying Boat sounds like as it lands? Usually any archive footage of the Pan am Clippers has a soundtrack of musical instruments however in this rare motion picture clip, you will hear the four Pratt & Whitney R-1830-S2A5G Twin Wasp 14-cylinder radial engines singing their own tune as it…

Today in the headlines I read where some families who lost relatives last March on the doomed Malaysian Airlines flight 370 will claim the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the plane is irrelevant … and that the airline still has a duty to pay them. Emotions aside, I found it interesting that one of the…

Yes, I have said that quite a few times and today is one of them.  Check out this very interesting photo of a World War II era Japanese fighter aircraft perched in a tree. I imagine the pilot survived the epic landing and was thanking his lucky starts as descended from the lush canopy of…

Today is the day Americans reflect upon the attack of our homeland which ushered the United States into World War II.  For me, I take this moment to not only reflect on the sacrifices of honorable men and women during World War II who would have much rather spent their time pursuing a career, a…