More music to model by
This will definitely put you "In The Mood"
(link)
According to my mother, the first word I said was "airplane" ("oh-pane") at around 11 months of age when a P-38 flew over the park we were in. I've had a love affair with airplanes and the people who are involved with airplanes ever since, which has become my career as an aviation historian and author.
I built my first model, a Strombecker all-wood P-80 (that dates me!) at age 6, after watching my father build other wood models for me. I quickly graduated to plastic models when I found Mr. Twist's Fix-It Shop on South Gaylord Street in Denver, with its corner shelves full of wondrous kit boxes. I built my first biplane (a Hawk Models Nieuport 17 - still available from Testors) before I was old enough to know that "biplanes are hard." With time out in the 1960s after graduating from high school for the Navy and college and "The Sixties" I returned to the hobby in 1970 and haven't left since.
I became a screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1980s, after first getting published as an aviation author in the 1970s in Air Enthusiast Quarterly. I love the fact that William Green, who wrote the first "serious aviation book" (All The World's Aircraft 1954) that I got my father to buy for me was the first person to publish me. I've flown the back seat of an F-4E Phantom for an article on the Wild Weasels in Air Force Magazine, and had 20 minutes stick time in Jim Nissen's 1918 Curtiss JN-4D Jenny back in 1979 for an article in Plane and Pilot, and been in everything in between over the past 47 years. When I worked in politics in Sacramento during the 1970s, I was a member of a club that flew Stearman N747JR (we called ourselves in as "Boeing 747 Junior") and got around 100 hours in that fun machine.
I'm one of the original members here of iModeler, and consider it the best model club on the planet.
Author of "Fabled Fifteen: The Pacific War Odyssey of Carrier Air Group 15", "Pacific Thunder: the Pacific War from Wake island to Leyte Gulf," "Tidal Wave: From Leyte Gulf to Tokyo Bay," "The Frozen Chosen: The First Marine Division and the Battle of Chosin Reservoir," "Holding The Line: the Naval Air Campaign in Korea," and "MiG Alley: The US Air Force in Korea - 1950-53" which will be released on November 26.
My most recent book, "Clean Sweep: VIII Fighter Command Against the Luftwaffe 1942-45" will be published by Osprey on May 23.
My wife of 27 years finally escaped Parkinson's on February 20 and sailed west to the unknown land beyond the sunset where she once again paints seascapes with her friends, her cats.
You can order all of them here: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Thomas+McKelvey+Cleaver&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
Music to model by: Glenn Miller and the Army Air Forces Band
Music to get you "In The Mood."
(link)
Hasegawa 1/32 Bf-109K-4
Another big Hasegawa Bf-109 model from January 2004, according to the site map at Modeling Madness, the 109K-4. The markings are inspired by a color photo in one of Jeff Ethell's "WW2 in Color" books of a shot-down late-war 109, [...]
Erich Hartmann’s last 109
By the Spring of 1944, the Bf-109G-6, which had been the primary production version of Messerschmitt’s fighter since the previous fall, was falling behind in the relentless race for performance. Beginning in the late spring, many [...]
Dragon 1/48 Fw-190A-7
Heinz Bär - Experte:
As an air‑minded working-class teenager, Heinz Bär took up the sport of gliding and soon became a qualified powered aircraft pilot at age of 17. With hopes of eventually flying for Deutsche Lufthansa, he joined [...]
Hasegawa 1/48 Fw-190A-3
In the fall of 1941, just as the RAF was beginning to get a handle on dealing with the Messerschmitt Bf-109F in its “Non-Stop Offensive” (called by the Germans with good reason “The Nonsense Offensive”), a new player arrived on the [...]
John Glenn – almost a MiG ace
My entry in the Nose Art group project.
John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had several incidents occur in his life that could be seen as "indicators" of his later achievement. As a Marine pilot in the Central [...]
74 years ago this week…
Around 2200 hours on the night of May 13, Captain Thomas and three friends interrupted their bridge game when they heard explosions to the north. They quickly realized it was a “show,” an air raid, though none realized what they were [...]
100 years ago today – April 21, 1918
There is likely no fighter airplane better known in the world than that flown by “The Bloody Red Baron of Germany,” as the song “Snoopy and the Red Baron” has it. People who know nothing about airplanes know the all-red Fokker [...]
