Ever wonder what it takes to become an Apache helicopter pilot? Former British Army Air Corps pilot Ed Macy gives this description in his 2009 book Apache: Inside the Cockpit of the World’s Most Deadly Fighting Machine.

As the most technically advanced helicopter in the world, the Apache AH Mk1 was also the hardest to fly…. To train each Apache pilot from scratch cost £3 million (each custom-made helmet alone had a price tag of £22,915). It took six months just to learn how to fly the machine, another six to know how to fight in it, and a final six to be passed combat ready. And that was if you were already a fully qualified, combat-trained army helicopter pilot. If you weren’t, you’d have to add four months for ground school and learning to fly fixed wing at RAF Barkston Heath, six months learning to fly helicopters at RAF Shawbury, half a year at the School of Army Aviation learning to fly tactically, and a final sixteen-week course in Survival, Evasion and Resistance to Interrogation, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps’ most vigorous training staff. Three years in total….

Flying an Apache almost always meant both hands and feet doing four different things at once. Even our eyes had to learn how to work independently of each other. A monocle sat permanently over our right iris. A dozen different instrument readings from around the cockpit were projected into it. At the flick of a button, a range of other images could also be superimposed underneath the green glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the TADS’ [target acquisition and designation sights] or PNVS’ [pilots night vision sight] camera images and the Longbow Radars’ targets.

The monocle left the pilot’s left eye free to look outside the cockpit, saving him the few seconds that it took to look down at the instruments and then up again…. New pilots suffered terrible headaches as the left and right eye competed for dominance. They started within minutes, long before take-off…. As the eyes adjusted over the following weeks and months the headaches took longer to set in. It was a year before mine disappeared altogether…. I once filmed my face during a sortie with a video camera as an experiment. My eyes whirled independently of each other throughout, like a man possessed.

An Apache helicopter pilot with the U.K. Army Air Corps in Afghanistan, May 2009. Photo: Cpl Rupert Frere RLC, UK Ministry of Defence.

Screenshot from UAVForge submitted video for a concept by team GremLion

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is trying out innovation the 21st century way: crowdsourcing. The agency, along with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic and Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems, wants to build an advanced unmanned aerial vehicle, so it asked engineers and designers to submit their ideas.

The initiative, called UAVForge, received submissions from more than 1,400 teams, who were encouraged to share ideas and problems they’ve encountered in the hope that they would build on each other’s ingenuity and create something they might not have by working in secret. It’s still a competition, though; whichever team creates the best product will take home a $100,000 prize. UAVForge is currently in the process of voting for the top 10 ideas.

This isn’t the first crowdsourcing project by the Department of Defense, which has experimented with software and, last summer, unveiled a particularly hideous but — DARPA hopes — extremely versatile and inexpensive combat support vehicle, the FLYPmode.

Crowdsourcing is certainly one way to cut way back on parts of the defense budget. And though the idea is probably not well-received, generally speaking, by defense contractors, it’s not all bad news — Northwest UAV has already been awarded a contract to manufacture the winning idea. One has to wonder how the 1,400-plus teams can integrate classified military do-dads — which one might assume an “advanced” UAV would have — not to mention keeping whatever they come up with themselves a secret.

Robert K. Smyth learned to fly in the U.S. Navy, where he flew fighter aircraft from the F8F Bearcat to McDonnell F2H Banshees, one of the first carrier-borne jets. In 1952, he successfully completed the Navy’s Test Pilot School and eventually left the service in 1955.

He soon joined Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corpopration as an engineering test pilot, flying the F9F Cougar, F11F Tiger and A-6A Intruder. He also contributed to the certification of the Gulfstream I, a pioneering twin-turboprop business aircraft that led to the Gulfstream II, which became the first of a long line of twin-jet Gulfstream aircraft.

Smyth was instrumental in the development of the Apollo Lunar Module during the 1960s, and in 1967 he was appointed Grumman’s chief test pilot. He and Bill Miller crewed the first flight of the F-14A Tomcat in 1970, but made bigger headlines when he and Miller had to eject from the aircraft just nine days later. (Smyth spoke about his career at the National Air and Space Museum in 2007. You can watch an archived video here.)

He left Grumman to join Gulfstream Aerospace, which was no longer part of Grumman, in 1981 and set numerous records as vice president of flight operations. He retired in 1993 and moved to Florida, where he died on Tuesday at his home at the Leeward Air Ranch in Ocala. He is survived by his wife, Sally, who requests that friends remember her husband by contributing to the Hospice of Marion County.

The U.S. Marines Corps recieved its first McDonnell F-4 Phantoms in 1962. In addition to the pilot, the F-4 had a Radar Intercept Officer (RIO), which of course led to a lot of front seat/back seat banter. According to Jon Lake and David Donald, authors of McDonnell F-4 Phantom: Spirit in the Skies, the droopy-tailed fighter saw action near Key West in the early 1960s:

The Marines were just too late to see action in the [October 1962] Cuban [missile] crisis, but the “Gray Ghosts” [VMF-531] did make it to Key West, where they flew scrambles against Mexican airliners, lost lightplanes and even the odd Cuban MiG-17. After Cuban MiGs strafed a fishing boat 50 miles southwest of Key West, Marine Phantoms were scrambled to investigate. Their crews soon discovered that the MiG-17 enjoyed a very short turn radius. As one of the MiGs closed onto the tail of his aircraft, one laconic RIO [radar intercept officer] was heard to remark, “You’d better do some of that pilot sh-t, ’cause we’re losing!”

Check out our February/March 2012 issue for more on the F-4—and nine other aircraft—in “100 Years of Marine Aviation: A Salute to 10 Aircraft That Carried the Few and the Proud Into History.”

A USMC McDonnell F-4 Phantom II on base, probably in Vietnam. Squadron VMFA-232. Photograph by Richard Rash, courtesy NASM.

While doing research on the Northrop Grumman B-2, we came across this story from Rebecca Grant’s 2001 book The B-2 Goes to War, about the stealth bomber’s combat debut during the 1999 Kosovo War. During a typical mission the bomber has to refuel four times. The first and last refueling occur over the U.S. East Coast, and are usually done by Air National Guard Units from Alabama, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.

Across the USA the news media was just breaking word that the B-2s were flying 30-hour missions to Kosovo. “Going east on my first mission, we hook up with a tanker, they’re out of Pittsburgh or somewhere,” said [B-2 pilot Bob] Colella. Coming back home, for refueling number four, they encountered the exact same tanker crew—a calendar day later. “The boom operator goes, ‘Hey, we refueled some of your buddies last night,’ and we say yeah, that was us. The boom operator couldn’t believe it. Give us your tail number, says the boom operator. This is standard procedure, so they can charge the B-2 for the gas; he notes it down and realizes that yes indeed, this was the very same B-2 he had refueled a day earlier. ‘Wow, you guys have been flying for 20 some hours!’ The boom operator teases them: when we got done with you, we went home, went to bed, cut the grass, took the kids to school, came back. Seriously, the tanker crew wants to know: how many guys do you have in the cockpit? Are you augmented 50% or 100%? There are just two of us, Colella says. Dead silence. Then the boom operator says, ‘You guys need a better union.’”

To read more about the B-2, look for Ultimate Aircraft, our upcoming special issue (on sale February 28) featuring more than 100 pages on how U.S. aerospace engineers developed stealth, speed, agility, and electronics to invent the ultimate combat aircraft.

A B-2 Spirit being refueled by a KC-10 aircraft. U.S. Air Force photograph.

A U.S. Army soldier with the 10th Special Forces Group and his military working dog jump off the ramp of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during water training over the Gulf of Mexico, March 2011. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez, U.S. Air Force/DoD.

Susan Orlean writes in her book Rin Tin Tin that at the outset of World War II, the movie-star dog reported with his owner Lee Duncan to Camp Haan, “where he was tattooed with his army serial number and rank (sergeant), and put through the same six-week training as the other dogs.

“As in World War I, the dogs were trained as sentries, messengers, scouts, mine detectors, airplane spotters, and cadaver dogs. The U.S. Army Air Corps also began experimenting with dropping the dogs by parachute behind enemy lines. (One accounting of the program states that a purebred boxer named Jeff ‘made thirteen jumps, twelve successfully.’)”

Wait…airplane spotters?

Yep, that’s right; according to author Orlean and Ron Aiello, who maintains the United States War Dogs Association Web site, the information is taken from an Army pamphlet describing what types of jobs Dogs for Defense might undertake for the war effort—not necessarily tasks they actually did. (We’re still not sure how the airplane spotting was supposed to work. Possibly the dogs would have been trained to tell one airplane engine from another by sound?)

Courtesy Simon & Schuster.

In 1958, Anna M. Waller wrote a study called “Dogs and National Defense” for the Department of the Army. In her history she notes that of the more than 10,000 dogs trained during World War II, their tasks were broken down as follows: sentry (9,295), scout (571), sled and pack (263), messenger (151), mine detection (140).

Today, there are about 650 dogs—helping to detect explosives—currently being used by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the New York Times reported on December 1, when American soldiers leave Iraq, their bomb-sniffing dogs will remain behind.

This is sad news for animal lovers, but we bring you a story of a bomb-sniffing dog with a happy ending: Sergeant Rex, by Mike Dowling and Damien Lewis, just published this month by Simon & Schuster. Read an excerpt on Amazon.

Last week a handful of lucky aviation fans got a special tour through the Lockheed Martin factory in Marietta, Georgia, to attend the rollout ceremony for the last F-22 Raptor off the production line. The group took part in the company’s first Tweetup, an outreach phenomenon organized via Twitter and popularized by NASA over the past few years.

The Tweetup is an ingenious (sly?) way to accomplish two things: 1) increase goodwill among current supporters — that is, rile up the fan base, and 2) circumvent direct media coverage to get attention. Participants are given behind-the-scenes access to facilities and special events, and usually spend much of it hunched over their smartphones live-tweeting it to their combined thousands (or more) of followers. The infectious, earnest, enthusiasm of a couple of tweets can be more effective than most professional goodwill campaigns.

NASA tracked the outgoing tweets from 150 participants at their August 2011 event to watch the launch of the Juno Jupiter spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center, and estimated that it resulted in a whopping 29.9 million impressions. Of course, NASA has capitalized on the Tweetup like no other public agency, so we were interested to see the practice expand to the private sector. Aside from ATK, which held a space-related Tweetup for fans to watch a solid rocket test this past September, Lockheed seems to be the first aerospace company to hold an event for ordinary people to get a behind-the-scenes look at a modern fighter jet.

But unlike NASA centers, Lockheed facilities are understandably shrouded in secrecy. In fact, the participants in the Tweetup weren’t allowed to take photos — despite being given free rein to tweet unfiltered details about everything they saw.

Lockheed’s Tweetup organizer Alison Orne told us:

We’ve seen how powerful Tweetups can be in increasing public awareness and engaging audiences in a new and innovative way…  We intentionally decided to start small and local with our first Tweetup around the  F-22 Final Assembly Rollout ceremony.

That’s probably smart, given that successive Tweetups seem to be exponentially more successful as an organization’s social media fan base grows.

We were curious about the origins of these events, so we asked the person who conceived them as a tool for NASA: Veronica McGregor, Manager for News and Social Media at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (She was also the voice behind the endearing first-person @MarsPhoenix account.) She emails:

Going back to 2008, tweetups were being held in various cities as informal get-togethers of “tweeps” residing in the same geographic location.  They usually took place in coffee shops, bars and restaurants.  I noticed a few of these going on, and I attended probably the first Los Angeles-area tweetup in late 2008.  It was a nice way to meet other people on Twitter,  but the get-together wasn’t focused on anything in particular.  Everyone split off into smaller groups of 2 to 4 people when they found people who shared similar interests.   I remember I found only one person at that tweetup who was remotely interested in space.

From that, the idea occurred to me to hold a tweetup at JPL to bring together like-minded people. I had seen the space community grow (especially with space fans finding each other through the @MarsPhoenix account)  and thought it would be a great idea to have them come to JPL to see our missions first-hand and have the opportunity to meet each other. I proposed the tweetup on twitter first, asking how many would be interested and what would be the best day/time (weekend, weekday, daytime or evening, etc.).  We got tremendous feedback and organized the first tweetup for an evening in January 2009 for about 120 people. We did pre-registration online and the event was filled in less than 90 minutes. People from around the country (and a few foreign nations) signed up.

McGregor also mentioned the CEO of Zappos came to the first JPL Tweetup; he was impressed enough to start holding them for his own company. Since 2009, other companies like Ford, Disney, and Sea World, not to mention museums and educational institutions like the Smithsonian and even the White House, have embraced this social media tool to get the word out.

It sounds like Lockheed is gearing up for more fan-centric events — maybe if you lobby nicely they’ll let you sit in the Joint Strike Fighter, hmm? Well, maybe not. But perhaps other aviation companies will follow Lockheed’s lead, and open their doors to the tweeting public.

"Have you seen me?" (Photo: Museum Vliegbasis Deelen)

The Museum Vliegbasis Deelen in The Hague, Netherlands, is missing its F-104 Starfighter. The 33-foot-long model of D-8105, with dummy missiles on the wingtips, had been mounted on tripods outdoors — until Sunday morning, when museum workers Twittered what they call an Amber Alert:

“A shocking discovery! Our Starfighter has fallen prey to people who use the current high metal prices to earn their keep. Or is it a practical joke? To kidnap the model, you need some seriously heavy machinery. If you see a Starfighter in a parking lot or on a flatbed trailer, contact us.”

Museum chairman Edwin van Brakel told reporters, “It would not fit in the back of a Fiat 500,” adding that it may be a prank because a note said, “Fly away. See you next year.”

John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Whether you love it or hate it, John Gillespie Magee’s “High Flight” remains the most enduring of aviation poems:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Sunday, December 11 marks the 70th anniversary of the mid-air collision over Lincolnshire, England, in which 19-year-old Magee was killed. An American Pilot Officer, he had crossed the border into Canada in 1940 to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. This weekend, Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire celebrates Magee’s life with a series of events, including a reading of his poetry.  Wikipedia has a very good page on Magee, who dashed off “High Flight” in a letter to his parents shortly before his death. His father, a curate of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., subsequently reprinted it in church publications. But the poem really gained fame after poet Archibald McLeish (then Librarian of Congress) included it in a poetry exhibition at the Library of Congress in February 1942.

Aerial view of Lincoln Cathedral, site of the December 11, 2011 commemoration. Courtesy Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.

While Magee wrote poetry in prep school (even winning a prize), the BBC speculated in 2007 that “High Flight’s” inspiration was due in part to hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) experienced by the author in his Spitfire. (Magee had written in his logbook about experiencing the symptoms of hypoxia while flying above 10,000 feet.)

“High Flight” is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force. A copy was carried by astronaut Michael Collins on his Gemini 10 flight, and it was quoted by President Ronald Reagan in his speech to the nation after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. The poem has found its way into dozens of pop culture references, including The Simpsons (in one episode Homer declared “we are about to break the surly bonds of gravity and punch the face of God”), Mad Men, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica.

“High Flight” also was used by U.S. TV stations when signing off for the evening. See a clip from the 1960s, here (“I was born in ’64, and I honestly recall seeing this from a playpen in my parent’s living room. I always wanted to be on that plane! I also loved this man’s voice,” writes one poster), and one from KCRA, in Sacramento, California, as late as 1986, here.

An F-16 goes belly-up. (Photo: ACC)

Although the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds will still fly at 2012 airshows, as will the Air Force Heritage team, the service recently announced that its A-10, F-16, and F-15 single-ship demonstration teams will not. These teams used to appear at dozens of military and civilian shows.

Citing “significant fiscal constraints” and “best ways to provide combat airpower to warfighting commanders,” Air Combat Command said it will “scale back from six teams we’ve historically sponsored” to only the F-22, which will fly at some 20 shows. “Reallocating those sorties will provide an increase in more than 25 combat-ready fighter pilots, and that’s a very good thing for our Nation.”

Translation: “Dammit, Jim, we’re a fighting Air Force, not the Weekend Playhouse. And we’re broke. On top of that, we’ve got terrorists to fight. We’re giving you the F-22. So suck it up and deal with it.”

Airshow organizers fear that the loss of loud, pointy jets will mean a loss of revenue in attendance. On the other hand, airshows may come out even in the end, since they won’t have to pay for hotels, cars, maintenance equipment rental, security, and music licensing for the demo teams. Aviationist.com suggests the Air Force Secret Hidden Message is, “The F-22 is good for airshows. All the other combat planes are good for war.”

U.S. Army Private Derek Hayes patrols Tarmiya, Iraq, 2008. (USAF/Technical Sergeant William Greer.

When U.S. soldiers go into combat, chances are they’re wearing at least 40 pounds of body armor—in addition to the weight of their weapon and ammunition. Typical protective gear worn by most American forces, says Body Armor News, “consists of a vest with a series of inserts that protect most of the upper body from armor-piercing rounds.”

Waist gunner wearing helmet and flak suit in action on a heavy bomber, circa 1944. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That got us wondering about the flak jackets worn by World War II bomber crews to protect them from airborne shrapnel. Turns out, their protective gear was designed by the Air Force in collaboration with—wait for it—medieval armor specialists at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who knew?

Global Security notes that then-Colonel Malcolm Grow, the surgeon for the Eighth Air Force, tallied the wounds received by his units, and determined that 70 percent were caused by low-velocity flak. He decided that light armor would offer the gunners adequate protection.

According to a 1945 article from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (“Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare” by Stephen V. Grancsay), the Air Force consulted the museum’s armor workshop. “The design of Armor Vest M6, which is the latest standardized flyer’s armor, is based on one of the Museum’s brigandines dating from about 1400.” And that’s not all: “The suits of armor in the exhibition halls are constantly studied for suggestions,” wrote Grancsay, “and no type which seems to hold the slightest promise of adaptation is overlooked. Heavy armor for the military sport of jousting, lighter battle armor, shirts of mail, scale armor, and the quilted jackets of renaissance days have all been carefully examined from a new viewpoint.”

Catch-22 began life as "Catch-18," a short, 10-page piece included in the April 1955 issue of New World Writing.

Fifty years ago today, Simon & Schuster published Joseph Heller’s masterpiece, Catch-22. The novel follows the exploits of Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier during World War 2 — just as the author was with the 340th Bombardment Group, 488th Bomb Squadron.

In a new biography titled Just One Catch, Tracy Daugherty writes that during Heller’s training in Victorville, California, he learned that “The bombardier was always the hero or the goat. The success or failure of each mission depended on his timing and accuracy. He also learned that the average life expectancy of a bombardier in heavy combat was three minutes.”

Heller in 1944. Joseph Heller Papers, Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina.

Since bombardiers were occasionally asked to navigate, Heller had to practice that skill as well—something he never mastered. Daugherty writes: “Once, he lost Georgia. Another time, electrical storms interfered with his radio compass. He didn’t know where he was. He pointed to the bank of a river below and told his pilot to turn left—he was sure he’d find a familiar landmark on the river’s opposite bank: a small farm, automobile headlights on a backcountry road. It turned out that the river he’d spotted was really the shore of the Atlantic, and he had pointed his crew toward Africa. Clouds yawed ahead. Finally, the pilot took over, patching together various radio signals to get them back to base with just enough fuel to land.”

Heller would fly 60 missions before shipping home in January 1945.

This month, troops in Afghanistan should start receiving supplies from unmanned helicopters for the first time. The K-MAX is an autonomous, cargo-carrying aerial vehicle built to be sent into dangerous territory, whether that’s due to enemy fire or rough terrain. That makes it an ideal alternative to convoys of resupply trucks.

The original version of the K-MAX is a piloted helicopter with intermeshing rotors built by Kaman Aerospace. Designed for heavy lifting, it’s often used in commercial logging and construction. Last December, the U.S. Navy awarded Lockheed Martin $45.8 million to develop unmanned versions as part of the military’s Cargo Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) program.

According to the Navy:

Results from the [Quick Reaction Assessment] confirmed that K-MAX exceeded the Navy and Marines’ requirement to carry 6,000 pounds of cargo per day over a five-day period. The system carried a total of 33,400 pounds of cargo during the assessment period, with nearly 3,500 pounds delivered in a single mission.

“K-MAX has the capability to deliver a tremendous amount of cargo over the course of the deployment,” said Maj. Kyle O’Connor, VMU-1 CRUAS Det. officer in charge. “We witnessed firsthand its ability to carry multiple loads to separate locations in a single sortie without being affected by harsh conditions.”

After the successful QRA in September, the Navy announced it would deploy the K-MAX in November for six months to assist with Marine Corps ground and air logistics operations in Afghanistan.

Photo: FEMA

For 30 seconds beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, November 9, every television and radio station in every U.S. state and a few of its territories, both broadcast and cable, will offer different programming than usual. Wednesday’s message will be continuous whether by audio, video, or digital stream: This is a Test.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has assured the public that “it’s not pass or fail.” It’s simply the first nationwide trial of the emergency alert system (EAS).

That system has been tested on a local basis every week for the last 15 years, when EAS replaced the emergency broadcast system. But it’s never been tested simultaneously from shore to shore. For one thing, it takes a lot of coordination: from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service. Weather alerts, unsurprisingly, have comprised most of the genuine, local uses of EAS.

Photo: National Archives and Records Administration

But EAS’s roots are not in storm warnings. Sixty years ago, a national system, CONELRAD (Control of Electromagnetic Radiation), was established in case of an air raid during the Cold War. Before CONELRAD, urgent news arrived by telephone or teletype machine to radio stations and fledgling TV networks, where a bulletin was typed in haste and handed to an announcer to read breathlessly on air. In March 1951, an FCC study recommended to President Harry Truman that “basic key stations” of the air defense command (ADC) and select radio stations reserve a special phone circuit and radio frequency to ensure a uniform and sober distribution.

On December 10, 1951, CONELRAD went live on two positions of the AM dial, 640 and 1240 kHz. It was tested nationally for the first time in the wee hours of September 16, 1953. By the summer of 1956, nationwide tests ran as long as 15 minutes and included a selection of tunes by the Air Force Symphony Orchestra. Almost from the start, though, the system gave false alarms from poorly wired connections or even lightning. Once a station on the CONELRAD circuit began transmitting, all other radio stations were to power down.

A public service announcement for CONELRAD. Photo: National Archives.

Commercial radio stations were often based in the center of cities, with their broadcast towers sitting atop the tallest available structures, making a natural bulls-eye for an enemy bomber to home in on its signal. To prevent such radio range finding, all stations other than the ring of CONELRAD transmitters were to temporarily cease broadcasting. Only brief bursts of emergency instructions were issued to prevent enemies homing in on the CONELRAD sites, which were nonetheless set well away from population centers.

Until 1963, the FCC required all radios sold in the U.S. to carry a mark reminding listeners where to tune in for civil defense instructions. Under CONELRAD, the small triangular CD or civil defense mark was also sold in a kit to glue onto the dials of older radios. When the national test transmits this week, we’ll see how that old technique compares to today’s digital reach.

Six Mustangs in trail: Now THAT’s a tight formation. (Photo: GatheringFoundation.org)

In 2007, 77 North American P-51s and 49 World War II pilots converged on Rickenbacker International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, for the final Gathering of Mustangs & Legends (the first was held in 1999). We previewed some of the aircraft in our September 2007 issue.

The Gathering Foundation has spent the years since producing a handsome book that documents the rodeo with hundreds of photos, a history of each Mustang that attended, and presentations on the military demonstration teams and airshow pilots who performed during the four-day extravaganza. The Gathering of Mustangs and Legends: The Final Roundup will be available in early December for $70, but the Foundation is offering a 20 percent discount for orders placed by November 25.

Proceeds benefit the Foundation’s mission: the archiving and exchange of information on vintage military aircraft and their pilots and crews.