Aviation

One boy and his airplane. Chip is a sixteen year old boy with a Piper J-3 Cub seaplane named Li'l Windy. He knows how to fly. He's been flying with his father for years. But now he is alone and the sky becomes his classroom. Though he does survive, every flight is an adventure, a great learning experience, and excellent preparation for the boy who wants to become a professional pilot. In fact you may wonder why commercial airline pilots are not required to have this kind of background. It's fun, but it's learning the hard way, discovering things as tangible as aerodynamics and as deep as how to live an entire lifetime. If you have a young person who's not all tha ...

Orphaned by the age of 10, Jim Turner was left without a permanent home, bouncing between living with family members in Upstate SC and Transylvania County, NC until he was drafted into the US Army in 1943. He originally volunteered to be a paratrooper but instead found himself on the way to Walker Air Field after graduating parachute rigging school - to join the “Battle of Kansas” in preparation for the new untested B-29 Superfortress. There he became a Hellbird. Then it was off to India, where Jim did triple duty as a parachute rigger, runway inspector and volunteer tail gunner. After surviving a crash in Burma during a mission and almost starving to death, Jim and the rest of the Hellb ...

In this booklet, the author, a U.S. Air Force Cold War veteran, offers interesting color photos of "roundels" (the insignia on an aircraft's wings & fuselage) that display the country of origin...sometimes, in striking national colors... Nowadays, air forces from the Royal Netherlands Air Force to the U.S. Air Force often display subdued roundels (as a form of camouflage)... Here's hoping the reader enjoys the interesting, sometimes colorful, world of military aircraft insignia; they are used by large nations but also other smaller nations like Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia...& many others!

This article outlines Joseph Stalin's attempts, from the 1930s until his death, to democratize the government of the Soviet Union. This statement, and the article, will astonish many, and outrage some. In fact my own amazement at the results of the research I'm reporting on led me to write this article. I had suspected for a long time that the Cold War version of Soviet history had serious flaws. Still, I was unprepared for the extent of the falsehoods I had been taught as fact. This story is well known in Russia, where respect for, even admiration of, Stalin is common. Yuri Zhukov, the main Russian historian who sets forth the paradigm of "Stalin as Democrat" and whose works are the mos ...