Free Republic

A civilian contractor pilot hired by the Hawaii Air National Guard was in serious condition Wednesday after crashing his plane during a military exercise off the coast of Honolulu, authorities said. A private sailboat rescued the unidentified 47-year-old pilot about 3 miles south of Oahu near Honolulu's Sand Island where he was then transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard. The Hawker Hunter jet went down in the ocean around 2:25 p.m. after taking off from Honolulu's airport, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said. The Hawker Hunter is a British jet developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, according...

Just been informed by a friend attending the Shoreham Air Show in the United Kingdom that a Hawker Hunter has crashed, possibly onto the nearby main road. No chutes observed. No other details.

Prisoners of war at Delhi's Palam airport after repatriation on January 22, 1966. The author is second from left. The second, or could it be called the third, Indo-Pak War was now nearly three weeks old, and there were no talks of a cease fire. To us in the field we did not really have a clear picture of how the war was going, or how either the Army or the Air Force was doing, on the ground or in the air. We knew of Air Force casualties more through the grapevine rather than through authentic sources. Our hope as...

OXNARD (CBS) — A jet making its way to Point Mugu Naval Air Station crashed in Oxnard Friday, killing the pilot on board, authorities reported. The Federal Aircraft and Aviation department received reports at 12:15 p.m. of a plane down at Laguna and Protero roads, near Cal State University Channel Islands. The aircraft is a Hawker Hunter jet registered to Airborne Tactical Advantage Company, a company contracted by the Navy to provide adversary support for fleet exercises off the California coast. “It’s a civilian-contracted airplane to the Navy, and it was a former military pilot,” Naval Base spokesman Vance Vasquez...

An attorney specializing in suits related to aviation disasters has died after crashing his vintage plane at the Oregon International Airshow. Robert Guilford, 73, crashed his plane shortly after taking off Sunday at the airshow, the Portland (Ore.) Oregonian reported Monday. Guilford, a former federal prosecutor, was a licensed pilot and vintage airplane expert who worked at California law firm Baum Hedlund, which handles serious personal injury and wrongful death cases related to commercial transportation accidents, the Oregonian reported. The law firm was employed in the cases of more than 55 airline crashes, including the 1996 wreck of TWA Flight...

Fighter ace sells medals to spare wife long wait for hip replacement By Neil Tweedie (Filed: 08/12/2005) One of the most decorated British fighter pilots of the Second World War has sold his medals, diaries and other memorabilia partly to pay for a hip replacement operation for his wife who faced at least a six-month wait on the National Health Service. Sqn Ldr Neville Duke, 83, the Royal Air Force's top-scoring ace in the Mediterranean theatre who set a world air speed record of 728 mph in 1953, put the collection up for auction rather than subject his wife Gwen...

A 67-year-old expert pilot from Texas died in a fiery plane crash less than 2 miles south of an airport runway at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport Tuesday morning. Thomas Benton Delashaw, whose nickname was "Sharkbait," of Conroe, Texas, was piloting an early 1950s vintage Hawker Hunter military jet aircraft