908 articles · 86K karma · 178 friends · active 3 hours, 53 minutes ago

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

Roland Robert Stanford-Tuck

Roland Robert Stanford-Tuck, with 30 victories one of the top RAF aces of the Second World War, joined the RAF in 1935 at age 19 on a short service commission, following two years at sea as a cadet. Tuck did not at first take to flying, [...]

Hasegawa 1/48 Typhoons

It's hard to believe these cardoor and bubbletop Typhoons from Hasegawa are going on 15 years old, but the cardoor kit was released in the summer of 1998, with the bubbletop released that fall. Traditionally, the hallmark of a successful [...]

Another Eduard Spitfire IX re-post

I just love it when I build a model and within days discover that nearly everything I did on it was wrong. So I took the model that was recently posted and re-did it into something correct. If you're interested in the information that led [...]

Another #$%^#@! Hasegawa Fw-190?

Yeah, another Hasegawa Fw-190 - it's what happens when you buy a stash of kits that were previously owned by a guy who liked the Fw-190 as much as I do. This is the limited-run Fw-190A-9, last of the radial Wurgers. markings from the kit [...]

The air war after D-Day – Hasegawa 1/32 Fw-190A-8 flown by Hans Dortenmann

When the Allied armies landed on the Normandy peninsula on June 6, 1944, there were fewer Luftwaffe aircraft to oppose the invasion than had been available two years earlier at the time of the Dieppe Raid. JG2 - the unit assigned to the [...]

In honor of D-Day: Priller’s Wurger

This is the 1/32 Hasegawa Fw-190A-8, done in the markings of Josef Priller, Kommodore of JG 26, the airplane in which he made his famous "strafing run" over Juno, Gold and Sword beaches on D-Day, the only appearance of the [...]

Another 1/48 Hasegawa Fw-190A-4

Another project from the stash of the modeler's estate sale. This is what happens if you fail in your assignment to build everything in your stash: your wife puts them in the estate sale cheap and somebody like me comes along and gets to [...]

Zvezda Yak-3

Given the editor reviewed the kit i thought I might show what it looks like finished. This is an excellent kit, as the video review reveals. I would be very happy if Zvezda were to do the rest of the Yaks, since this is really the best [...]

Eduard and Roden 1/48 Fokker D.VII

Both done about 7-8 years ago when the kits first came out. The Eduard kit is an OAW-built D.VII in the famous markings of an otherwise-unknown airplane, with the markings of The Seven Swabians, an ancient German folk tale about a bunch of [...]

The good old days

Walt reminds me what fun Stearmans are. ("A Stearman isn't landed til it's shut down, chocked down and tied down") Air-to-airs of various Stearmans up in the Sacramento area back in the 70s. The first 3 shots are our Stearman [...]