Today starts a new month and we here are GrogHeads never like to pass up the opportunity to talk about our two favorite pastimes: military history and gaming. One day Brant was playing solitaire on his Mac, bored out of his mind when the light went off. “May sounds like the start of the A in aviation. We’ll dedicate the month of May to military aviation!”

And so with little more than a poor alliteration and some concatenization we created May-viation.

Despite our lack of planning and vision we have managed to work up enough articles that we think we can manage to publish most of our content in May about military aviation, be it games, history, or both. Exceptions will take place. We can’t force everyone on Kickstarter to only create games that fit our theme, so while the boys at GARPA will be looking for air-based wargames we can’t promise they’ll find them. And variety is the spice of life, so expect a few non-aviation themed articles once in a while.

But rest assured that if you’ve been hankering for some air superiority, we’ll do our best to bring it to you throughout the month. We’re also going to launch a contest. Because March Mayhem was such a success we have decided to do something similar to it for May. We will publish a list of 16 early period World War II single-seat mono-engine fighters, and the first 16 guys to claim them in our forums will get to dogfight until the top aircraft, as voted on by our forumites, has been declared. Yes, there will be some legalese (set anchor to verbiage below) just to ensure anyone with insomnia has some reading material, but the good news is that we’ve got some prizes on the way from a number of companies. Not all of them have arrived yet and we don’t want to offer something we don’t have in-hand yet, but we’re wargamers and it is May-viation, so figure that the prizes should fit the theme.

With that in mind, allow me to introduce the 16 contenders for best early war fighter (single-seat, mono-engine, yada-yada):

Best Single-Seat Mono-engine Early Fighter Aircraft of WWII (nothing past 1941)



Bell P-39 Airacobra


Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
Dewoitine D.520
Focke-Wulf Fw 190
Grumman F4F Wildcat


Hawker Hurricane
Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3


Lavochkin La-5


Macchi C.202
Messerschmitt Bf 109 


Mitsubishi A6M Zero
Nakajima Ki-43 


Reggiane Re.2001
Rogožarski IK-3


Supermarine Spitfire
Yakovlev Yak-1

These aircraft were selected by yours truly. The decision to cut off with this list was based on the rough production year (or at least saw a prototype) of 1941, the fact that I wanted to have 16 planes – no more, no less – and that if we went much later we’d get ourselves into aircraft that ended up later in the war and really have an issue with apples-to-oranges comparisions (yes, I’d love a good discussion of the P-51D versus the Me-262, but we’ll save that for another time). So the choice of selecting these aircraft is mine and mine alone. Arbitrary? I hope not. Yell at me in the forums if you don’t like them, but there it is.

Contest registration will run from May 1 – May 9, 2013

follow the jump for the rules