GHOSTS 2025 Calendars, The Great War & A Time Remembered

by Philip Makanna

“All of my settings are on automatic. The camera makes the decisions . . . I do my best to frame the picture and survive. I have had three good crashes in my 45 years. A good crash is a crash that you can walk away from.”

Once again we deviate from our rule not to review calendars, and this year we have an even better reason than last time: these Ghost calendars are now in their 45th year, which makes the introductory quote all the more salient. It does not appear in either of the calendars but in a recent feature of Makanna’s work in The Reflector, one of the oldest camera club magazines in the US (if you’re wondering, the still-active Delaware Photographic Society, founded in 1931 and a Charter Member of the Photographic Society of America).

Most of Makanna’s WWI work is done from the gunner’s seat of a 100-year-old fighter, or from a high wing Cessna with the door removed so he wears a harness hooked to something solid.

Not to repeat the basic facts of life as already enumerated in our review of the 2024 calendars, let’s just establish, for the sake of context and for those who haven’t yet heard of US photographer/publisher Phil Makanna, that one calendar deals with WWI (The Great War) and the other with WWII (A Time Remembered) aircraft.

This N9MB Flying Wing was the last of the four built; it crashed in 2019, killing the pilot. 
WWII aircraft fly faster so Makanna’s camera ship is usually an AT-6 trainer which has a rear seat. In the AT-6“D” model that seat can rotate to face backward, very handy.

Now, while Makanna is still wielding his cameras, he’s in his Eighties so he doesn’t strap an aircraft to himself as much as he used to. Instead he draws on his archive, which explains why there are photos here that involve people and possibly aircraft that are no longer with us. For the casual user this is entirely of no consequence but some arch aircraft spotters might be confused. The page preceding the actual calendar does disclose owner, pilot/operator, and location but no date; the individual captions identify the aircraft by type/variant and serial/registration number which is a hard clue for anyone inclined to consult other sources.

At 20″ x 14″ (open 20″ x 28″) the calendars are large enough, and the sturdy, glossy paper (suitable for framing) is good enough to showcase lovely detail in regard to textures (especially relevant to the WWI machines with their cloth and wood) and also light/reflections and atmospheric conditions. Budding photographers would probably have appreciated being told more of Makanna’s background and technique so let’s just say he started as a painter and made sculptures of aluminum and lacquer. If you’ve never photographed anything that is not only itself constantly moving but also against an ever-changing background you will be studying these images and wonder how he does it. Shutter speed explains only so much (max. 250th of a second); every maneuver has to be choreographed, pilots have to have keen situational awareness, and the respective aircraft have to have compatible operating parameters (stall speed, rate of turn etc.). Well, all that deserves its own book . . . 

The caption for this WWI photo sets a sobering mood: “A Sunday morning service at an aerodrome in France. The Chaplain conducts the service from the front of an FE.2b aeroplane.”

A year has twelve months, ergo each calendar has 12 photos plus a context-specific opener photo on the inside front cover that sort of sets the mood (left). The calendar portion is obviously divided into days, plus 3 tiles containing the featured aircraft’s specs and a 3-view (below). The day tiles are really not meant to be written in, not least because many contain noteworthy aviation events on that day in history. Some convey broader war-related information and some entries are particularly amusing in that they go beyond a “just the facts, ma’am” flavor. Example, Sept. 23 in the WWII calendar says “1943: Mussolini—now a mere puppet manipulated by Hitler—proclaims the ‘Italian Socialist Republic.’” The events recorded in each calendar correspond to the type of aviation it covers, in the WWII version the earliest one is from 1935 and the latest from 1945 but in the WWI version the earliest one goes way-way back, to 1540 (cloth-covered wings) and the latest dates to 1919.

The Great War calendar shows:

• Albatros D.Va [2 different airframes]
• Bristol F.2B
• Avro 504K
• Sopwith Snipe, Tabloid, Camel, Triplane
• Royal Aircraft Factory BE.12, S.E.5a
• Fokker E.III Eindecker, Dr.I Dreidecker

A Time Remembered calendar shows:

• North American P-51D-20-NA “Mustang”
• Republic P-47D “Thunderbolt”
• Supermarine “Spitfire” LF Mk. IXc
• Hawker “Sea Fury” FB Mk.11, “Hurricane” Mk.XIIa
• Douglas SBD-5 “Dauntless”
• Grumman F7F-3 “Tigercat”
• Chance Vaught F4U-5N “Corsair”
• Northrop N9MB “Flying Wing”
• Fairchild PT-19A “Cornell”
• Yakolev YAK-3UA
• Avro 652A “Anson” Mk.1

Incidentally, Makanna still has some 2024 calendars lying around: $10 each! His loss, your gain.

Copyright 2024, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info).

GHOSTS 2025 Calendar, The Great War

by Philip Makanna

GHOSTS, 2024

List Price: $17.99 + $10 shipping

ISBN 13: 0 916997 72 3

and

GHOSTS 2025 Calendar, A Time Remembered

by Philip Makanna

GHOSTS, 2024

List Price: $17.99 + $10 shipping

ISBN 13: 0 916997 71 5