Commemorative Air Force

Commemorative Air Force The CAF is dedicated to Honoring American Military Aviation through Flight, Exhibition, and Remembran

The Commemorative Air Force (CAF) was founded in 1957, a time when the U.S. military was scrapping the fleet of aircraft that had played a decisive part in winning World War II. With the rallying cry “Keep ‘Em Flying”, the initial goal of the CAF was to preserve, in flying condition, at least one example of each aircraft flown by the American Forces from 1939-45. Over the decades that followed, th

e CAF became the world’s largest owner and operator of vintage military aircraft. Today, the organization owns 184 historic planes valued at over $50 million, most of which are in airworthy condition. The airplanes are dispersed among 80 CAF units, located in 26 states. The CAF is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with annual revenues in excess of $24 million. Aided by a huge volunteer effort from more than 12,000 members, the CAF’s aircraft and educational programs reach millions of Americans each year. The CAF’s mission is to educate, inspire, and honor through flight and living history experiences.

Long before Bea Arthur became the formidable Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, she was Staff Sergeant Bernice Frankel...
08/29/2026

Long before Bea Arthur became the formidable Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, she was Staff Sergeant Bernice Frankel of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.

Born in Brooklyn on May 13, 1922, Frankel grew up in Cambridge, Maryland, where her parents operated a clothing store. After high school, she briefly attended college and worked as a food analyst, testing canned goods for mold and bacteria. She later moved to New York, held several jobs, and volunteered as an air-raid warden after the United States entered World War II.

On February 13, 1943, the Marine Corps began recruiting women under the slogan “Be a Marine…Free a Man to Fight.” Five days later, Frankel applied to join. Because she was still two months short of her 21st birthday, she needed her parents’ permission. In a letter included with her application, she explained that she had been preparing to begin a new civilian job when she heard that the Marines had opened enlistment to women. “I decided the only thing to do was to join,” she wrote.

Frankel formally entered the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve on February 20, 1943. She trained with the first class of women Marines at Hunter College in New York and initially served as a typist at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C. She soon requested a more active assignment, arguing that her previous experience made her better suited to motor transport. The Corps approved her transfer to Motor Transport School at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in June 1943.

After completing the course, Frankel served as a military truck driver and later as a dispatcher at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina. Women Marines were barred from combat and overseas service, but they filled essential stateside positions that allowed male Marines to be reassigned to fighting units. More than 20,000 women served in the Marine Corps Reserve during the war.

While stationed at Cherry Point, Frankel married fellow Marine Robert Alan Aurthur. She later kept a modified spelling of his surname as her professional name. Her service evaluations reveal hints of the strong personality audiences would eventually recognize on television. One interviewer described her as “frank and open,” but also “argumentative” and “over aggressive.” Another added, “Officious, but probably a good worker if she has her own way!”

Arthur advanced from private to staff sergeant in little more than two years and received an honorable discharge in September 1945. Her discharge paperwork recorded her intention to attend drama school. In 1947, she enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in New York and began building a career on the stage.

She appeared in the influential off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, originated the role of Yente in Fiddler on the Roof and won a Tony Award for playing Vera Charles opposite Angela Lansbury in the 1966 musical Mame. Television brought her an even larger audience. After appearing as the outspoken Maude Findlay on All in the Family, Arthur received her own series, Maude, which ran from 1972 to 1978 and earned her an Emmy Award. In 1985, she began her other defining role as Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, winning a second Emmy in 1988. She was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2008.

Curiously, Arthur denied having served in the Marines during a 2001 interview. She never publicly explained why, but her extensive official personnel file leaves no doubt about her service. It contains her enlistment papers, photographs, assignments, promotions, marriage documentation, and honorable discharge as a staff sergeant. The National WWII Museum and the Department of Veterans Affairs have both documented her wartime record.

Bea Arthur died of lung cancer at her home in Los Angeles on April 25, 2009. She was 86 years old.

During World War II, the PBY Catalina hunted submarines, protected convoys, and rescued downed airmen. But few surviving...
08/29/2026

During World War II, the PBY Catalina hunted submarines, protected convoys, and rescued downed airmen. But few surviving Catalinas have a combat record like PBY-5A BuNo. 2459.

Accepted just weeks after Pearl Harbor, 2459 deployed to Iceland and became the first PBY credited with sinking a German U-boat, ultimately sharing credit for the destruction of three during the war.

In this episode of CAF Warbird Tube, American Heritage Museum President Rob Collings tells the story of 2459 and the painstaking effort to restore it to its 1942 combat configuration, from rebuilding its nose turret to recreating its wartime markings.

To watch LIVE on Wednesday, September 2 at 7pm Central, register here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/1545292581918359641?source=Social

On August 29, 1938, Major Alexander P. de Seversky, arguably the grandfather of the P-47 Thunderbolt, set a new transcon...
08/29/2026

On August 29, 1938, Major Alexander P. de Seversky, arguably the grandfather of the P-47 Thunderbolt, set a new transcontinental speed record.

Seversky departed Floyd Bennett Field in the Seversky AP-7 Pursuit, an all-metal racing aircraft derived from his company's P-35. Bound for the Lockheed Air Terminal at Burbank, California, he covered the 2,457-mile transcontinental route in 10 hours, 2 minutes, 55.7 seconds, establishing a new east-to-west transcontinental speed record. The flight included a roughly 30-minute refueling stop at Kansas City, and Seversky encountered a hailstorm over Kansas that forced him to climb to approximately 16,000 feet and use supplemental oxygen. The AP-7 had been built for famed aviator Jacqueline Cochran, who would fly the same aircraft to victory in the Bendix Trophy Race just days later.

Alexander Nikolaievich Prokofiev de Seversky was born on June 7, 1894, in Tiflis, Russian Empire, now Tbilisi, Georgia. The son of an aviation enthusiast, he learned to fly while young and graduated from the Imperial Russian Naval Academy in 1914. During World War I, he became a naval aviator with Russia's Baltic Fleet. On his first combat mission in 1915, his aircraft was brought down while attacking a German vessel, and the explosion of one of its bombs killed his observer and so badly injured Seversky that his right leg was amputated below the knee.

Fitted with an artificial leg, he fought successfully to regain flying status and returned to combat, eventually becoming one of Russia's leading naval fighter pilots. After the Russian Revolution, Seversky remained in the United States, where he worked as an aeronautical engineer and test pilot, collaborated with Brigadier General Billy Mitchell on demonstrations of air power, became an American citizen in 1927, and established the company that became the Seversky Aircraft Corporation.

Following his 1938 transcontinental record, Seversky became increasingly prominent as an advocate for American air power. He lost control of the Seversky Aircraft Corporation in 1939, after which the firm became Republic Aviation. Alexander Kartveli, whom Seversky had hired and who designed the P-35 and AP-7, stayed with the new company and went on to develop the P-47 Thunderbolt, one of the most important American fighters of World War II. You can definitely see the family resemblance between the AP-7 and P-47 in the photo, can't you?

Seversky devoted much of his later career to writing and lecturing on military aviation, most famously in his 1942 book Victory Through Air Power, which argued for the decisive importance of long-range strategic air forces. He continued advising on aviation and national defense for decades, received the Medal for Merit and the Harmon Trophy, was presented with the United States Air Force Exceptional Service Award in 1969, and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1970. Alexander P. de Seversky died at Memorial Hospital in New York City on August 24, 1974, at the age of 80.

Life advice from an old airplane, part 2.
08/28/2026

Life advice from an old airplane, part 2.

Would you have guessed that the Navy's first TV-guided cruise missile was an old surplus F6F Hellcat?On 28 August 1952, ...
08/28/2026

Would you have guessed that the Navy's first TV-guided cruise missile was an old surplus F6F Hellcat?

On 28 August 1952, during the Korean War, the U.S. Navy's Guided Missile Unit 90 launched an explosive-laden Grumman F6F-5K Hellcat drone from USS Boxer (CV-21) against a railroad bridge at Hungnam, North Korea. The pilotless Hellcat was remotely controlled from an accompanying Douglas AD Skyraider, while a television camera aboard the drone transmitted a view of the target back to its controller. The operator could use that image to steer the Hellcat toward its target, turning one of the Navy's most famous World War II fighters into an early television-guided precision weapon. The mission marked the first combat use of an unmanned Hellcat and the Navy's first combat launch of a guided missile from an aircraft carrier.

The idea of using unmanned aircraft as weapons was not new. During World War II, the United States experimented with radio-controlled, explosive-filled bombers under the Army Air Forces' Operation Aphrodite and the Navy's Project Anvil. Hellcats themselves had also been converted into drones before Korea, including unmanned F6Fs used to collect samples from the radioactive clouds produced during the 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. What made the Korean War program different was its combination of carrier operations, airborne remote control, television guidance, and an expendable aircraft carrying explosives against an enemy target.

Guided Missile Unit 90's system offered a potential solution to one of the most dangerous problems facing naval aviators over Korea. Bridges, tunnels, power facilities, and other important targets could be surrounded by heavy antiaircraft defenses. Rather than sending a pilot directly into that fire, the Navy could send an obsolete Hellcat while the crew controlling it remained farther from the target. The concept resembled a primitive cruise missile, except that instead of building an entirely new weapon, the Navy repurposed surplus fighters that had already fought their war.

The August 28 attack was the first of six combat missions flown by the F6F-5K drones between August 28 and September 2, 1952. The targets included bridges, railroad tunnels, and power facilities in North Korea. The experiment demonstrated that an unmanned aircraft could be launched from an operational carrier, controlled from another aircraft, flown into enemy territory, and guided toward a specific target using a live television image. The combat results, however, were mixed. Fewer than half of the missions were considered successful, and the Navy did not continue the Hellcat attack-drone program as an operational weapon.

The technology was more significant than the brief combat career of the F6F-5K might suggest. Television guidance and remotely controlled aircraft continued to develop, while unmanned Hellcats remained useful as target drones for testing newer weapons. The six missions flown from Boxer were an early glimpse of a form of warfare that would become commonplace decades later. In 1952, though, the Navy was already launching pilotless, television-equipped aircraft from a carrier and steering them toward enemy targets from another airplane. It just happened to be doing it with one of the great piston-engine fighters of World War II.

Anyone else, or just us?
08/28/2026

Anyone else, or just us?

There's a LOT of history in this photo from 1966, taken at the dedication of the CAF Museum in Mercedes, Texas!You may...
08/27/2026

There's a LOT of history in this photo from 1966, taken at the dedication of the CAF Museum in Mercedes, Texas!

You may instantly recognize the famous Chuck Yeager in the photo. Yeager was a WWII fighter ace and legendary test pilot. He became Commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, where he selected the pilot standing next to him, Captain Joe Engle, for ARPS.

If you look very closely, you can see Engle is wearing astronaut wings, which he earned by flying the North American X-15 above 50 miles three times in 1965. He would go on to become a NASA astronaut and fly the Space Shuttle, making him the first of only two people in history to fly to space in two different winged vehicles.

Both Yeager and Engle were CAF Colonels. Between the two of them, they flew the CAF’s P-40, P-51, P-39 and P-63 over the years.

Flanking the two Air Force officers are CAF Director Tom Short on the left and CAF pilot Gerald Martin, who would go on to be part of the group of CAF pilots who flew for the film Battle of Britain.

On 27 August 1939, the Heinkel He 178 lifted off and completed the first recognized flight of an aircraft powered solely...
08/27/2026

On 27 August 1939, the Heinkel He 178 lifted off and completed the first recognized flight of an aircraft powered solely by a turbojet.

But was it really the first jet? Yes and no.

At its most basic, jet propulsion is the production of thrust by expelling a high-speed stream of gas. By that broad definition, rockets are jet engines, and the first rocket-propelled plane had actually flown in 1928.

Eleven years before the He 178, Fritz Stamer piloted the Lippisch Ente on the first successful flight of a rocket-powered aircraft. Fritz von Opel followed with a public flight of the purpose-built Opel RAK.1 rocket plane in September 1929. Rockets could produce tremendous thrust, but their short operating time and need to carry both fuel and oxidizer made them poorly suited to sustained atmospheric flight.

Italy’s Secondo Campini pursued a design called the motorjet. His Caproni Campini N.1 used a piston engine to drive a compressor, with fuel burned in the compressed airflow to increase thrust. It flew on 27 August 1940, exactly one year after the He 178, but because the He 178 flight had been secret, it was, at the time, considered the first successful "jet" flight. But the motorjet carried the weight and complexity of a piston engine without the performance promised by gas-turbine propulsion.

Engineers also experimented with pulsejets, which produced thrust through a rapid series of combustion pulses without using a compressor or turbine. German engineer Paul Schmidt began developing one in 1928, but pulsejets did not achieve a clearly documented successful aircraft flight before the He 178. The concept eventually powered the V-1 flying bomb, where its simplicity and low cost outweighed its tremendous noise, vibration, and poor fuel efficiency.

The turbojet offered a more practical solution for sustained atmospheric flight. Instead of using a separate piston engine to turn the compressor, part of the engine’s own exhaust energy drove a turbine connected to it. Air entered the engine, was compressed, mixed with fuel and burned, then expanded through the turbine and exhaust nozzle. Once running, the engine sustained its own cycle and produced continuous thrust without a propeller or an independent compressor engine.

British engineer Frank Whittle and German engineer Hans von Ohain developed practical turbojets independently during the 1930s. Whittle patented his concept first and ran an experimental engine in 1937, but von Ohain received the industrial backing necessary to put one into an airplane sooner. Heinkel built the He 178 as a private experimental venture, and its brief flight on 27 August proved that a turbojet could power an aircraft by itself.

The He 178 was not fast enough, reliable enough, or long-legged enough for operational service, but the basic principle was sound. Within a few years, aircraft such as the Messerschmitt Me 262 and Gloster Meteor demonstrated what the technology could become. Later turbojets and turbofans would transform military aviation, commercial transportation, and the very sound of flight.

So, was the He 178 the first jet aircraft? In the broadest technical sense, no, but in the sense of what most people mean when they say "jet", yes.

Check out the CAF events coming up in the next couple of weeks below. Or, see ALL of our upcoming events at: commemorati...
08/27/2026

Check out the CAF events coming up in the next couple of weeks below. Or, see ALL of our upcoming events at: commemorativeairforce.com/events

Aug 26-30 • Ride the B-29 and friends in Fayetteville, AR
Aug 27 • Defending, Even When Unwanted: Tuskegee Airmen & Women of WWII in Janesville, WI
Aug 28-30 • Piston & Props in Janesville, WI
Aug 28-29 • Airshow of the Cascades in Madras, OR
Aug 29 • High Sierra Squadron Swing Dance in Reno, NV
Aug 29 • Ride the Airbase Georgia Warbirds in Birmingham, AL
Aug 29-30 • Warbird Roundup in Nampa, ID
Sep 2-6 • Ride the B-17 in Chino, CA
Sep 2-7 • Ride the B-29 and friends in Oklahoma City, OK
Sep 3-6 • Airfest 2026 in Wildwood, NJ
Sep 5 • Warbird and Wheels in Lancaster, TX
Sep 5 • Ride the AT-6, BT-13, N3N and JRB in Houston, TX
Sep 5-7 • Wings of Pride in Branson West, MO

📸 Kevin Hong, Sector K Media

Check out the lineup of aircraft scheduled to appear at Aviation Discovery Fest in Dallas on November 6-7! Rides will b...
08/26/2026

Check out the lineup of aircraft scheduled to appear at Aviation Discovery Fest in Dallas on November 6-7! Rides will be available on most of them, and there will also be ground vehicles, reenactors, veterans, and more. Check out the details at https://aviationdiscoveryfest.org/

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