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Western Pennsylvania Aerospace Archive and Gallery

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Western Pennsylvania Aerospace Archive and Gallery

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This is a private collection of documents, art, and memorabilia related to the history of aviation and spaceflight.

10/27/2026

This of course is Concorde, specifically a 1/144th scale diecast model complete with dropped nose.

Concorde is inarguably one of the most aesthetically pleasing aircraft ever conceived. (Though had it been built Lockheed’s L2000 would have rivaled it in any beauty contest.)

It was also (arguably) the only successful supersonic transport. Its only contender was the Tu 144, and the Tupolev really only pretended to enter commercial service. The bigger argument is whether Concorde itself was truly successful. Engineering wise absolutely. Economically?

The stupendous machine was the result of a joint British French partnership to compete with Boeing’s 2707 SST. Ironically the elaborate 2707 never got off the drawing board.

Which nation’s design team dominated in Concorde’s development is debatable, but frankly Concorde sure looks like France’s proposed Caravelle II.

I got to see Concorde fly just once, back in 1977. I watched one takeoff in afterburner and climb out from Dullas. That experience is burned into my memory. I’m sure I was as thrilled as my father was when he saw the Graf Zeppelin 44 years earlier.

10/27/2026

Vietnam was known as the helicopter war and the Bell UH-1 “Huey” has become the symbol of that war. However a very different helicopter fought that there in the pre-Tonkin Gulf era, when many Americans didn’t know we even had troops in combat.

From 1961 (three years before we were officially involved) until the Huey arrived in 1964, the Piasecki H-21 was the lone airmobile platform in Vietnam. Five US Army aviation companies operated approximately 100 H-21s. 19 were lost to enemy action.

Known as the “flying banana” for obvious reasons the H-21 was powered by a single Curtiss Wright radial engine. Though it was nominally capable of carrying 22 passengers, in the heat of Southeast Asia it could usually lift a single 9 man squad with their weapons abd gear, plus a crew of three. It was usually armed with just one .30 caliber M1919 or M60 machine gun.

10/25/2026

A forgotten Cold War warrior, the Grumman OV-1 Mohawk. A strange machine with propellers and a bug eye canopy, the OV-1 was part of the Army’s rather obscure fixed wing fleet. For nearly 40 years these machines went in harm’s way, usually hauling a huge side looking radar to peer over borders, keeping an eye on the likes of North Korea and East Germany. The OV-1 had teeth too. It proved quite effective in the close air support and even battlefield interdiction role. In 1968 an OV-1 even shot down a MiG 17.

This is a nearly 70 year old contractor’s model made for Grumman by Topping. In fact the was likely created before the Mohawk entered service as it represents an early version with short span wings. It is in standard Army pre-Vietnam colors, gloss olive drab with a large “U.S. Army” in yellow on the right wing and a white “Army” on the fuselage.

10/25/2026

10/16/2026

This is an example of artistic license, though not as far from reality as it may seem. Here we have X-15A2 climbing toward space - wearing a brilliant red paint scheme!

No, no X-15 was ever painted red, but X-15A2 wore pink for while. It was an ablative heat dissipating coating. So the artist’s choice of red is not so wild.

Regardless I like this illustration and I paired it with a card signed by Joe Engle who flew the X-15 (and later the shuttle). General Joe Engle was the last living X-15 pilot.

09/11/2026

This was a gift from the son of a very close friend of mine. He is a newsman, not an internet influencer, but an actual bona fide, newspaper reporter and editor. He encountered Anna Fisher earlier this year and asked her to sign a photograph for me.

Anna Fisher is a physician and chemist who became an astronaut in 1978. She is a veteran of STS - 51A from 1984, a mission that launched two satellites and retrieved two more to bring back to Earth.

Among her many achievements she was the first mother to fly in space.

08/17/2026

This is a cover of the January 3, 1969 issue of the year with the crew of Apollo 8 presented as Time’s men of the year. It has been signed by the entire Apollo 8 crew.

The crew of Apollo 8 were the first to venture beyond low Earth orbit. They traveled a quarter million miles through cislunar space, fired their engine to enter lunar orbit, and became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes. On their return they traveled faster than any human before them.

My family and I watched their live broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas and it remains one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

I thing the flight of Apollo 8 was every bit as significant as the first landing on Apollo 11.

08/11/2026

This is just an old magazine ad from the early 1970’s. It is interesting though. The Lockheed C-5A was very seriously considered as a shuttle carrier aircraft. In fact NASA hadn’t been cost trimming at the time it very likely would have been selected. (They bought used Boeing 747s instead.)

The first proposal was to actually sling the shuttle between two C-5As with the aircraft joined by a new center wing! The “piggy” back method was finally settled upon, but the ad mentions a third option that I had never heard of previously - towing the shuttle behind the C-5A on a cable!

Given the shuttle woeful L/D ratio and the masses involved that may have been an exciting ride. It is also interesting that the shuttle seems to be depicted as bare metal. Not only that but the orbiter cockpit looks a lot like the cockpit of a DC-3.

08/06/2026

I am not sure this belongs here, but this is a nearly 70 year old Russian Poljot Kirovskie watch produced to celebrate the first satellite - Sputnik 1. Apparently it has a 16 jewel movement. It no longer works, at least not reliably. It stops and resumes working when tapped, which I am told indicates shock damage or dirt. It is a pretty little watch with rockets in place of some numerals.

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