Aviation historian and former military reporter Dani Shalom dies at 79 after illness

Dani Shalom, one of Israel’s leading historians of aviation and a former writer for the daily Hatzofeh, died on Saturday at 79 after an illness. He was widely regarded in professional circles as one of the country’s top experts on aviation and space history, and possibly its leading authority. Over his lifetime he published 20 specialized books on the history of aviation in the Land of Israel, and his latest, on Operation Kadesh, appeared only weeks ago.

Shalom was born in Tunis in 1947 and immigrated to Israel with his parents at age 2, settling in Lod. He later said the nearby airport, now Ben Gurion Airport, became his childhood playground, where he walked among planes, spoke with pilots and befriended mechanics who gave him manuals and deepened his fascination with aircraft. He studied at a religious high school in Ramat Gan, and at 13 took a bus to Eilat just so he could return on an Arkia flight, his first ever.

During the Six-Day War he served as a radio operator in the armored corps while publishing aviation drawings in the Air Force magazine. One of those illustrations, of a Mystere jet attacking an Egyptian armored column in Sinai, later appeared on the cover of an anniversary edition and, according to an account by then-child Amir Eshel, inspired him to become a pilot; Eshel later became commander of the Air Force. After military service Shalom worked at Israel Aerospace Industries as a draftsman on the Arava aircraft, then at Elisra, where he managed the engineering documentation department.

He later spent 17 years at Hatzofeh, first as a transport reporter and then as a military correspondent, until the paper was sold and closed. In 1979 he obtained a light-aircraft pilot’s license, bought a ultralight plane and flew it from the airfield in Rishon Lezion. He also founded the aviation magazine BaAvir in 1975, first called Beyaff, which became a serious rival to the Air Force magazine. In later years he pursued his long-time dream of creating a museum on the history of aviation in the Land of Israel, located at the Rishon Lezion ultralight airfield and named, like his encyclopedia project, after his late daughter Yifat Ben Yosef, who died suddenly 15 years ago. One major project there was a full-size reconstruction of the Blériot, the first aircraft to reach the country in 1913, completed in 2013 with Holtz pre-military aviation students and Air Force youth groups.