I saw a show on the History Channel and they are talking about how every pilot used to paint a picture on the nose of their airplane. I wonder if there are any places on the web where you can see collections of those pictures. I hear some were a little risky and some were pretty G rated.

Even better, do any of you have grandfathers that used to fly in WWII and talked about the picture that they had on their airplane?

RoverRoad

Most nose art durind WWII was found on bombers. Here are a few links with examples.

Nose art 1

Nose art2

Nose art 3

Nose art4

Nose art5

That's very cool!.. Nose art 1 is the best link. It's great to see that there are people that are interested enough to want to catalog all of the pictures. I can't imagine this kind of art happening in any other country but America. In fact, The US during WWII is really the only time in our planet's history where you'll find this kind of art. I guarantee you that it would never be allowed in todays US military! So we're talking about a snapshot in history, we'll never see this again!

You still have things like this. Admittedly, the A-10 Warthog is so ugly that anything is an improvement!

Actually, if you can ever get to a little airport in Kingman, Arizona you can see hundreds of photos of mostly B-24 bombers that were taken before the birds were cut up as scrap. They had hundreds there post war and filled the floor of the large valley there. As far as today, we frequently would paint nose art on our helicopters but in black so that it is subdued and not easily seen. Sometimes an energetic and artisitc crewchief would draw something in chalk up there as well. It still gets done just nowhere near the scale of back then.

Here is a small sample of what was in Kingman:
http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Larkins/1177.htm

...and some chopper nose art VietNam era:

http://www.vhpamuseum.org/Art/Art.html

I would think that the bomber graveyard
at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base would
be a great place to see that kind of
wonderful art.

Actually ds, I was out there a couple of years back and they really don't have anything that old. Really nothing from WW2 most were VietNam era aircraft and most are in the brushed aluminum configuration.