Airplanes Main

Historical sketches of every aircraft ever built. Or so I intend.

While I started Acepilots.com with a focus on World War Two fighter planes and aces, my interests have spread out - to include the First World War, the Golden Age of Aviation between the wars, and even post-war jet airplanes, essentially the entire history of aviation, civilian as well as military.

Peruse the archives below, by “Category” or by “Tag,” and you find some fascinating information. I have scanned much unique material from the 1930s: articles from a 1935 Aero Digest magazine, photographs that my father took in 1936-38 at some New England airports, and cartoon sketches from a Sunday newspaper feature, the Hall of Fame of the Air. More recently, I added some scans of books from 1919 and earlier. Contemporary news accounts from the New York Times online archives have also added a sense of how these events were reported at the time.

You can read here about WW2 planes’ technical development and production, see photographs, read contemporary pilots’ descriptions, see detailed data tables about them, etc.

Eventually, I will consolidate all the airplane articles right here in these archives.