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Skyways The Journal Of The Airplane 1920-1940, No. 60, October 2001

By Jim Schubert

WWI Aero The Journal Of The Early Aeroplane, No. 174, November 2001

As you can see, the new Skyways quarterly has a smashingly attractive, double-wide, cover painting, celebrating 15 years of publication.  The beautiful cover is supported by two comprehensive articles on the Curtiss XF9C1 and F9C2, a report on Oshkosh 2001 and the Boeing 307 Stratoliner - Clipper Flying Cloud and good coverage of Andrew King's new Ryan M-1 Mailplane.  All this good stuff is bolstered by an interesting article on the Walter Carr racer - of which I was unaware - and the usual regular and occasional departments.  Racing Notebook is back covering the Laird Solution and Super Solution (with a couple of drawings by John Alcorn of IPMS-Seattle) along with Roscoe Turner's Laird-Turner racer and ten other "Golden Age" racers.  Models, Wants And Disposals, Skyway's Reviews and From The Readers round out the issue.  Another great read and a lot of references to note in your various subject files.

In the past, prints of these special double-wide covers have been made available for separate purchase.  I hope that this will be the case with this cover.

Boy!  Here’s another great cover to celebrate WWI Aero's 40th year and 174th quarterly issue.  Within this issue the editor has reprinted, in its entirety, the first issue - actually the first newsletter of the Antique Airplane Association World War I Club, June 1, 1961.  The first issue was all of three pages in horizontal format.  The magazine format did not appear until issue #33 in October 1971.  Leo, you've come a long way baby!

This is also the first, and I hope not the last, issue of WWI Aero to be printed on good, heavy, gloss stock, paper, which provides much better reproduction of both text and graphics.  Skyways switched to good paper a while back and went to slightly larger print for the benefit of us old farts.  I sure hope WWI Aero stays with this improved quality paper.

There are 21 separate articles, columns or features - many with sub features - in this 144-page issue.  My favorite, which is of use to any model builder is:  Building An Airscrew The Simple Way by Achim Engels of Germany who takes us step-by-step through the making of an Axial of Berlin Type One Airscrew as used on the Fokker Dr.I.  The aim of the exercise is to demonstrate the drafting, laminating, carving and finishing of a full size propeller of seven laminations.  The drawing is beautiful and the photos make the step-by-step process easy to understand.  Having recently made a laminated half-hull model of a boat, I am keen to make a propeller.  By appropriately scaling the drawing of the laminations, or "Lifts" as boat designers call them, a modeler can make the propeller in any size.  When, however, you get down to 1/72nd scale the laminations will be pretty thin!

I find the number, and eclectic mix, of the subjects, columns and features of these quarterly journals makes them very hard to cover adequately in "brief" reviews.