Does anyone know what the flags are that are hanging towards the top of City Hall?

crazy that this portion of the skyline looks very similar today

Here's the plane type

sick!!

wow this photo is badass, wanna use it for an album cover

My parents were teens during the war and would tell me about low flying aircraft doing training.
The Navy had an airfield in the Navy Yard until about 1960. There are still large hangers from the aircraft factory that was open until 1940.

Markers for planes to not hit it?

I was surprised to see the PSFS building in the photo because I assumed it wasn't nearly that old based on its modern style, but I was wrong. Built in 1932 and (according to an unsourced claim on wikipedia) it is considered the country's first modern skyscraper.

The city looks small from way up here. I wonder who’ll survive.

It might be the insignia for a military unit but I am not sure

that's what I was thinking since WW2 ended that year

That’s such a great photo!

Cool. Doesn't really look that different now. PSFS building changed. And buildings can now be taller than the rim of Will Penn's Hat. (that was actually a law)

But from this angle the city just about looks the same then as it does now.

this is sick

What a great photo

Market West is the side that has evolved the most. The Philadelphia Arcade Building, right out of frame to the right, along with Broad Street Station should never have been tore down. It was epic: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.skyscrapercenter.com/thumbs/32865_500x650.jpg

It's a dive bomber from WWII.
What's sick or nuts is how there were used.
With a dive bomber you put the plane in a dive, heading toward the target. (They have air brakes to slow the plane down, but it still is a crazy thing).
It turns out that the ballistics problem of aiming the bomb is much easier with dive bombing versus a plane dropping a bomb when flying level (Level bombing). Of course, it takes nerves of steel and titanium gonads to do a dive bombing attack.
Dive bombing was used mainly against shipping. Dive bombing was also used as a "mobile artillery" by the Germans with their (in)famous Stuka dive bomber (Ju 87). [wikipedia on Stuka] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87)
Other famous/infamous dive bombers were the US Douglas SBD Dauntless and Japanese Val (Aichi D3A).

I wonder when dive bombing started to phase out. Also pretty wild to see a bombing plane at all flying over philly

I think with more accurate bombing techniques/bombsights it went away.
However a bombing plane over Philly is really no different than one of those military plane flyovers during big events. The only difference is that the new military planes could do much, much, much more damage than a dive bomber,