LEGACY PROJECTS
CALLSIGN Publishing is introducing a first-of-its-kind in military aviation journalism: Legacy Projects. Each issue is a long-form, coffee-table, collector's-edition print issue dedicated entirely to the history, culture, and operations of a single squadron or airframe and the men and women who were part of it.
LEGACY
PROJECTS
CALLSIGN Magazine is introducing a first-of-its-kind in military aviation journalism: Legacy Projects. Each issue is a long-form, coffee-table, collector's-edition print issue dedicated entirely to the history, culture, and operations of a single historic squadron or airframe and the men and women who were part of it.
OUR PROJECTS
HARRIER LEGACY
Since 1971, the AV-8 Harrier has defined the Marine Corps’ ultimate example of flexible basing—a VSTOL jet that could operate from clearings, boats, taxiways, metal strips, and austere forward bases no other fixed-wing aircraft could reach. Last June, VMA-223 ‘Bulldogs’ flew the Harrier’s final sundown flight, closing out a 55-year legacy.
CALLSIGN spent the final two years documenting the last three Harrier squadrons, conducting dozens of oral history interviews with the pilots, leadership, and maintainers who lived it—with many more to come. The result is an upcoming long-form, coffee-table collector’s edition print—a permanent record of the Harrier’s role in Marine Corps aviation, told by the men and women who flew, maintained, and took it to war.
RED DEVILS LEGACY
VMFA-232 is one of the oldest and most decorated squadrons in Marine Corps aviation, tracing its lineage from Vought biplanes over China in the 1920s to Hornets in Desert Storm and combat operations across Iraq and Afghanistan. To commemorate their centennial, CALLSIGN embedded with the squadron at MCAS Miramar and on deployment to Japan.
We spent our time in the hangar, the ready room, and on the flightline— building a coffee-table collector's edition that tells a century of Red Devils history in their own words. Heavily visual, deeply reported, and built on oral histories reaching back to Vietnam, this edition tells the behind-the-scenes stories that make the Red Devils the legendary squadron they are today.
For 43 years, the KC-10 Extender quietly kept American airpower in the fight, flying continuously in the CENTCOM theater from August 1990 to October 2023 without a single break in operations. Before she retired in 2024, CALLSIGN flew aboard the Air Force's last active KC-10s, Excalibur, embedded with the 9th Air Refueling Squadron at Travis AFB, to capture the story her crews carried for four decades before it disappeared.
The KC-10 Legacy Project collects that history into a coffee-table collector's edition — part oral history, part photo archive, part love letter to a tanker to give her the send-off she deserves.