As a website ages, it strikes me that it gets harder and harder to ferret out the better posts.
If you’d like to check out old aviation photos, click the tags of various airplane types in the sidebar to the right.
Here are what I think are the best of those related to China’s Wings, in loose chronological order:
- You’d better hope you fall in love with it: how I discovered the China’s Wings story
- “Back then, I was younger than you are now”: attending my first reunion of the CNAC Association and summary of the CNAC story
- “Where were you ten years ago, Mr. Writer, when I had twice as many members?”: admonished by the CNAC Association’s president
- What was, at the time, the world’s most exciting undertaking — flying: how I fell in love with the story before Pearl Harbor
- What was CNAC?: historical summary of the China National Aviation Corporation
- All roads led to Moon Chin
- Moon Chin joins CNAC
- How the San Francisco earthquake made Moon Chin a US citizen, part 1 of 3, which begins a series of 8 more posts (in sequence), about Moon Chin’s youth
- Why interviewing Moon Chin is like interviewing a jazz riff: interviewing the airline’s Chinese personnel was very different than interviewing its Caucasians
- Bill Maher goes to Hogy Taw: the passing of a fine man
- My son Ryan dressed as William Bond for Historical Halloween: this was awesome
- Only three things seemed able to hold his interest… and they either wore skirts and heels, held cards and cocktails, or had wings and engines–an introduction to Chuck Sharp, chief pilot and operations manager of CNAC through much of its crux history
- Hugh Woods and a favor for the US Navy: a humorous outtake and an introduction to CNAC pilot Hugh Leslie Woods
- The engine coughed, sputtered twice, and died Moon Chin makes a forced landing in a rice paddy
- Chungking’s lone flush toilet
- The White Countess, my favorite Shanghai movie Natasha Richardson, Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, and Shanghai… what’s not to like?
- One of the great moments of my life putting the first copy of China’s Wings in Moon Chin’s hands. And the second in my son’s.
- recommended further reading for China’s Wings: interesting books I discovered during my research
- Moon Chin’s first air raid, part 1 of 2
- The hardest cut, part 1 of 3: my favorite outtake, and one hell of a great story
- Emily Hahn, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, China’s Wings and the “Boxer Uprising” CNAC anecdote featuring some of the leading literary lights of the time
- Ernest Hemingway and China’s Wings what Hemingway wrote about the CNAC pilots in Islands in the Stream
- “All right, Mickey, but why a limey?” Pilot Hal Sweet mentions Mickey Hahn’s pregnancy — and wins a cigar
- “Goddamnit, I promised the wife I wouldn’t do this any more”: pilots behaving badly
- “Those planes are Japanese!” CNAC attacked on Pearl Harbor Day
- China’s Wings – how the sausage got made what it took to write the book
- What it took to keep ’em flying: a little evidence to document the massively complex logistics of keeping an airline flying
