-What a wonderful time-people dressed nice, they had self-respect for themselves/others, craftmanship everywhere, and some very, very brave pilots. Even the fuel trucks had class.
I remember reading many of The Earl of Steinhauer’s articles written years ago in The Beam. Indeed, a great video. Closest thing that I have seen to being there! Wow! Turner, LeVier, Whittman! Many thanks to the presenter.
Whoever shot the color we must remember that person. Color film back then was expensive and very costly. Seeing it in color was fantastic. Seeing Steve Wittman and Bonzo his plane of his design was WOW! He held the patent for the leaf spring landing gear used on the Cessna’s today.
my Dad was 16 in 1939 and said that many “aeronautical engineers “ really just “ winged-it” designing planes that were tweaked from other existing designs and were generally experimental !!! … amazing that more people didn’t die flying them !!!
At 66 now what a thrill to watch air race movies. Met Jimmy Dolittle once at Watsonville air show, he sat in My turbo Honda BD5 ,BIG SMILE .said how fast Tim 140 hp...three bladed prop Shallow dive 203 mph. Met Pappy Boynton OSKOSH 1976...SAID VAROOM VAROOM GREAT MEMORIES THANKS FOR AIR RACES
What a fantastic color presentation of life in America in 1939! Love seeing Tony LeVier working on his Firecracker racer before he became a famous Lockheed pilot! (0:39)
I used to ride my bike here in the late 60’s & watch the planes, you could go out of the terminal put a dime in the yellow box & listen to the pilots & tpwer
19:43 Kinda looks like Czech Mate. (Crashed in 2022) - And I thought being at Reno in 1980 was the golden age of air racing. lol This was a pleasure to watch, thank you.
Thank you for posting. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the young men watching this race or participating would go on to serve in Ww2 and Korea. I flew as a commercial airline pilot for years. Enjoyed the stories of the old timers when I first started flying. So much rapid change in such a short time.
And there was Steve Wittman in Bonzo (the little mid-wing home-built with tiny wheels and small rectangular wings) getting a little long in the tooth in it's fifth season, but still as fast as any of the big-dollar military contractor hardware.
These guys were way ahead of the Army and Navy with aerodynamics. All of their pioneering efforts bore fruit in the defense of Europe against the Nazis and defeating Japan just a few years later.
Do you realize that WWII had just started in Europe just over 3 weeks prior, and in 2 short years were in the thick of it and the majority of the people seen here would end up serving in some capacity. All of these military acft would be obsolete. I think whoever took the silent color movies did a better job than the newsreel gang. It was absolutely fascinating.
Incredible footage...Do you realize that you have footage of the experimental XB-15 @ 12:23? This is the only one built! I wonder if the guys at Boeing know about this footage???
Unfortunately 98% of the people currently working for Boeing have no idea what the XB-15 was. For years I want to build an aluminum model of this beautiful machine even in scale 1:48. I hope that biological time will allow me.
It's amazing that the racing planes and most of the military planes featured in this seem ancient, yet many others like the Piper's and Aeronca's seem timeless. Great footage!
Hey CFreed . You seem ancient with your lack of respect for these guys. They weren't playing with toys. This is heavy duty .The planes that you love right now the will be (by your reasoning) "ancient" very shortly. Does that mean that they were ancient piles of crap?
It is sad to me to realize that anyone participating in a 1939 film as an adult was born in 1921 or earlier and is likely long dead by now. An 18 year old from that era would be 97 today. An infant in 1939 would be 79 by now. Where have all the flowers gone? I was born in 1954 and don't have much longer to go myself now. Seems like yesterday that I was a boy building $1.00 plastic kit models of some of these airplanes!
I grew up in Cleveland and it's sad to me how few people that live here even know that these races took place here. The Crawford Museum is the only local place that has really captured any of the history of these races.
Yeah, I'm one of those born in 39. My dad was an airplane nut and worked for Packard Motorcar Company in Detroit in those years. He was their chief trouble shooter on the P51 engine. He always talked about going the the Cleveland Nationals but never made it before heart disease took him in 1956. I'm still flying actively and have a 1957 Apache (twin engine) that I fly almost every week. Yes, 99% of those in the pictures are gone but I ain't dead yet, "Contact!".
Bummer Packard didn't stick with making aircraft engines after WW2 . Bet if they had, Packard turbofans would be flying folks around the world and Packard rocket engines would have taken us to the moon! Patents 672256, 3190554, 3013505 .
They were British engines made under licence. The Merlin was what powered the Spitfire, Hurricane, Lancaster. The P51 was useless until it was fitted with a Merlin as an experiment by Rolls Royce.
After I viewed this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-l85Z2sJV9Tk.html I'm taking Tony's advice and buying a couple of boxes of each one ! ( Wonder if Lockheed was ok with this plug?)
I was struck when I saw the size of the crowds in the grandstand. I think I have seen high school football games with more people. Then I realized that the population of people at that time was far lower than the population of today. That and this may have been considered a sport for the affluent, perhaps? Regardless, I absolutely love this video post and I am so grateful you have placed it here for us as it is just incredible. Thank you!
The National Air Races drew the largest crowds of any events from 1929 through 1939, according to everything I've read. Lindberg's flight in 1927 was still fresh on the minds of everyone.
Ces images la sont incroyablement rare en couleur voir unique! Il y a des appareils que ne connaissais pas et d' autres si?! Merci pour cette vidéo vraiment extraordinaire!!! Un abonné français...
I wish The Lord woulda made my time in the Golden Days. God Bless. Hard to watch. I love Jimmy Doolittle and ALL the ole racers as an aviation nut i am.
With the little research I've done, I've learned that many of these planes were either highly modified or home builts, so it's sometimes hard to determine their origin. That was the blessing/curse of these races. Plane manufacturers lost interest in the races because the pilots were building their own planes from all sorts of pieces/parts. Imagine if NASCAR were racing cars that were built by getting parts from the junk yard. The big auto manufacturers wouldn't invest a dime. That's what happened to the air races.
That's half of what makes them so cool, like the old land speed record cars, or to a lesser extent F1 before the money. Do you know of any decent books on the old races?
The French were into simple light weigh fighters in the 1930's with some of their designs showing up at American Air Races. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rlRUhSaOK3s.html
If your referring to #5 , It was named the Chester "Goon" flown by Art Chester made just for the air races....Started in 1938.....Last heard from in 1991 where The Goon was purchased by the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum and was awaiting restoration in Macedonia, Ohio
Why? "The military" didn't make or design planes. They paid companies to design them, they gave them the target performance and parameters and let them all try to come up with an effective and practical solution. And that plane would be useless as a racer. It is a tiny little plane with no visibility and an air cooled inverted six engine. I don't see anything about that plane that would surprise anyone in 1939. It is not enough just to make a fast plane, it has to have a useful warload and range, altitude performance, etc. You can do that with a tiny racing I've with a high tuned racing engine.
The Flying Aces Club of the U.S. commemorates these races at every contest we have by flying free flight rubber powered stick and tissue models of all these famous airplanes in our "Mass Launches" where the last one down wins. I'm 76 and have flown in the Ford Tri-motor shown in the film.
I regret "Not Knowing" my grand parents "whole story" from A Boeing Executive Secretary during the war to a flight engineer bombing Germany and one member Whom joined the RCAF, RAF as a US citizen Pre War, then a member or AAC once we got in, to the END in fighters. One who went on through the USN into all the pragmas through the shuttle.
The only had to be 36, but that still meant WWI, many incurable diseases, enormous tobacco use, not seat belts, proably means that you are completely right! My father did not die of jaundice, and he survived fighting in WWII, so I expect having a large family is a relatively recent phenomenon.
