GHOSTS 2027 Calendars, The Great War & A Time Remembered

by Philip Makanna

“We dreamed of being test pilots and we studied silhouettes and filed blunt white-pine wings with little sandpaper paddles to make them sharp and graceful. We hung die-cast propellers on straight pins. The tiny props turned in the wind as we walked across the lawn, holding the plane overhead so that it banked majestically against the sky. We saw ourselves diving out of the sun, ducking through clouds and rolling in the sky like lazy sharks. These dreams of freedom encourage our earthbound spirits.”

What strikes us about this remark is that it’s about emotion; without it air-to-air photography is merely about motion, which suits the subject but doesn’t amount to art.

Young Master Makanna (b. 1940) had his blood stirred by the Wildcats and Hellcats made by nearby Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation on Long Island (which, incidentally, would later produce such iconic machines as the F-14 Tomcat and the Apollo Lunar Module) but that experience did not foreshadow his eventual career path in a field in which he would emerge as one of the most influential practitioners. In that light, his original training as a painter and sculptor may seem a detour but the understanding of light and composition it gave him elevates his photography … which is why, once again, our resolve to not review calendars has weakened.

Unusual for the time: side by side seating. Lovely aluminum work on the engine cowling.

We don’t like reviewing calendars because there’s only so much you can say about the formal building blocks (size and presentation, design) of a calendar because, if they work, the stay the same year over year. So, since we don’t like repeating ourselves you’ll have to read the previous reviews to appreciate what makes these particular calendars special, one featuring WWI (The Great War) and the other WWII (A Time Remembered) combat aviation. One thing that is special for sure is that US photographer/publisher Phil Makanna and his wife have produced these calendars for over 45 years. At 20″ x 14″ you could wallpaper your house if you had all of them. Speaking of walls, if you hang a calendar—from its nifty reinforced pre-punched mounting holes—allow for double the height, 28″. Printed on sturdy, glossy paper the images are suitable for framing. The bottom halves contain the daily calendar tiles, populated with diary-type entries re historic events on the particular date, aircraft specs and 3-view, and a thumbnail of the previous and next month (below).

The October page has a reminder that next year’s calendar can be ordered. As to the open-air cockpit Polikarpov I-15bis, the data panels says it has a service ceiling of 32,200 ft, which seems like a typo but is not because it was designed for low-level dogfighting and ground support so could make do without a canopy or any sort of supplemental breathing oxygen.

If you are an aircraft geek you may not need any background on the aircraft shown; all the calendar gives you is type, pilot, owner, and the briefest of data sets. The photos, which have been taken years and decades ago (Makanna is basically retired from the photography side of things), are not dated and that is something the very serious aficionado of vintage aircraft will find confusing because in some cases neither the pilots nor the specific aircraft exist any longer or are with different operators.

If the background hadn’t been dialed back you wouldn’t be able to make out the spindly airframe.

As before, only the WWI calendar gives an aircraft’s year of manufacture so the fact that they are not shown in chronological order incurs no penalty because you can still figure the timeline out and so appreciate the technical aspects of aircraft development and design. Also as before, nothing is said about camera gear and logistics. For a calendar such details are obviously not par for the course anyway.

The Great War calendar shows: