Free Republic

Looking back on it all more than 80 years later, Group Captain John 'Paddy' Hemingway starts to chuckle: 'I just wondered what would happen next — and luckily the right thing happened next!' That is one way of recalling an experience so terrifying that most of us would probably have nightmares to our dying day. One moment, on the afternoon of August 26, 1940, Pilot Officer Hemingway, aged 21, was flying his RAF Hawker Hurricane head-on towards a fleet of German Dornier bombers bound for London in broad daylight. The next, he took a bullet in the wing — then...

SINGAPORE - Less than 12 hours after his stall was awarded one star in the inaugural Singapore Michelin Guide, Mr Chan Hon Meng, 51, was back at work whipping up his signature soya sauce chicken dish for customers at Chinatown Complex. A queue of 10 people had formed at his Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice & Noodle outlet even before it opened on Friday (July 22) morning. As of 10.30am, there were 21 people in the queue. Following his award, Mr Chan is considering introducing new dishes and opening another outlet. He told The Straits Times he has no...

Most Wichita-area residents breathed a sigh of relief last December when former Gov. Mark Parkinson, along with city and county officials, inked a $45 million deal for aviation manufacturer Hawker Beechcraft to maintain 4,000 jobs in Wichita. The deal was cut after months of community drama in which company officials threatened to uproot the 75-year-old Wichita company and move it, lock, stock and barrel, to Louisiana. The company had also demanded that union contracts be set aside and vowed to send pieces of the company to Mexico. These threats came after Hawker Beechcraft had cut its Kansas workforce by one-third...

Union officials said Wednesday that Hawker Beechcraft is considering moving work out of Wichita that could shrink its hourly work force 50 to 75 percent over the next two years. Union and company leaders met Wednesday about the future of the Wichita facility and its jobs, the union said. "The outlook given by the company was bleak for the future," Machinists District 70 president Steve Rooney said in a letter to workers. "The picture we are getting is of a Hawker Beechcraft Wichita that will shrink almost immediately down to 25 percent or more within two years, without a guarantee...

The scene is still one of the most evocative in this island's history: dashing young pilots in their fighter planes, defying the odds as they speed across blue summer skies towards the intruder above southern England. A German aircraft goes into an uncontrollable spin, smoke pouring from its bullet-riddled engine as it plunges to earth. At an RAF station on the ground, the mellifluous voice of Vera Lynn wafts from a nearby wireless. From the House of Commons chamber, Winston Churchill's whisky-soaked growl rouses a nation to resistance at its moment of darkest peril. Seventy years on, the Battle of...

The UK Royal Air Force will mark the end of an era in its proud maritime patrol heritage on 31 March, when the last of its British Aerospace Nimrod MR2s will be retired from use. Commemorated during a formal ceremony at RAF Kinloss in Scotland late last week, the occasion will bring to an end 41 years of operations with the Nimrod: a type derived from the world's first jet airliner, the ill-fated de Havilland Comet, which first flew in 1949. Having been selected in 1965 to meet the Ministry of Defence's Operational Requirement 381, the original Hawker Siddeley Nimrod...

Hawker Beechcraft announced Monday that fractional ownership company NetJets has canceled a "significant" number of aircraft it had on order. The cancellations will reduce Hawker Beechcraft's backlog by $2.6 billion and represent 90 percent of the aircraft that NetJets has on order with Hawker Beechcraft. The planes were to have been delivered over several years beginning in 2011. So far this year, NetJets has canceled 12 aircraft it had on order and deferred delivery of all jets it was scheduled to receive this year and next until the end of 2010. Hawker Beechcraft has said that NetJets wasn't expected to...

In his letter, Schuster also cited problems with the government’s stimulus package, which he said fails to loosen credit markets, and a slowing of orders from previously high-volume business segments. Schuster also blamed the media and some politicians who have cast general aviation as “a wasteful extravagance instead of a critical business tool and the source of millions of American jobs.”