Prepare to Engage

Your Indy Transponder crew participated in a bloggers roundtable last night to discuss Showdown: Air Combat. The new program will air June 15 and is hosted by none other than Major Moga. I'm looking forward to the episode about the June 1917 dogfight. Here's what the Episode Guide shares:

CHIVALRY IN THE AIR: SPAD vs. ALBATROSS
At the onset of World War I, the airplane was barely a decade old and therefore military aircraft were being developed and built on the fly. Battle tactics were worked out by trial and error and often at the cost of a pilot’s life. However, encounters in the skies over Europe created a new breed of hero – the air ace. This episode features one of the earliest air battles from June 1917, where Frenchman Georges Guynemer flying a SPAD squared off against German Ernst Udet in an Albatross.

Major Moga shared last night that this was probably his favorite episode because of how much he learned and the insight provided into why the Fokker was built the way it was.

Below, we've shared Scott Palmer's write-up on the program. Scott was on the call last night, too.

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Showdown: Air Combat via Dictatorship of the Air by Scott Palmer on 6/11/08

This coming Sunday, 15 June at 9 pm (CST) the Discovery network’s Military Channel debuts a new program aimed at aviation history buffs. Showdown: Air Combat uses restored aircraft and interviews with veteran pilots to recreate aerial combat encounters from the First World to the (almost) present.

Showdown is hosted by Major Paul “Max” Moga (an F-22 Raptor pilot with the Air Combat Command’s 1st Fighter Wing) and Dr. Jim Mowbray (Professor of Strategy, Doctrine, and Airpower at the Air War College). Among the individual encounters slated to appear are match-ups between an F-86 Saber and MiG-15, a P-51 vs. an Me-109, and a P-38 vs. a Zero. The Great War will be featured in an episode devoted to the famous June 1917 dogfight between France’s “ace of aces” Georges Guynemer and Ernst Udet (Germany’s #2 ace after you-know-who).

As a run-up to the program’s debut, the Military Channel invited a small group of air-minded bloggers to contribute comments and questions to Showdown’s hosts via a telephone roundtable. The half-hour conversation covered a wide range of issues including: WWII pilot training, ground-support operations in Afghanistan, and the rapidly escalating costs of developing 21st-century fighter aircraft. Once the recording of the roundtable has been made available by the folks at the Military Channel, I’ll post a link to it here.

In the meantime, you can look forward to Showdown’s debut this weekend.

ScP