Aviation History 2011-09

SEPTEMBER 2011

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Discussion: Film footage of a deadly F-lOO Super Sabre crash ended up being used in several Hollywood productions (story, P. 42). Should the U.S. Air Force permit use of official footage like this in commercial releases?

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The 40th Bomb Group B-29 Eddie Allen.

40th Bomb Group Superfortresses The airmen of the 40th Bomb Group conducted the very first B-29 combat missions, taking Superfortresses over "the Hump" fi'om India to China and bombing the Japanese Home Islands for the first time since the Doolittle Raid of 1942. WWI Ace Edward "Mick" Mannock With 61 confirmed kills, RAF ace Fdward Mannock bested his instructor and good friend James McCudden, who called him, perhaps reprovingly, "a typical example of the impetuous young Irishman." Latham's Triumphant Failure In July 1909 Frenchman Hubert Latham made the first attempt to fiy across the English Channel in an airplane, but when his Antoinette IV developed engine trouble, he instead became the first to ditch a plane on water.

MAILBAG Murphy Strikes at BuAer

Love Field Legacy

The article on the "Supersonic Revolution" [by Richard P. Hallion in the July issue] was terrific. It reminded me of my days working for the Navy Department, Bureau of Aeronautics, in the early 1950s, when I developed a method for predicting transonic pressure drag. When asked by a BuAer contractor what my basis was, I told him I used D-558-2 flight test data, which had been published in a secret document and was distributed to aU contractors. He later told me they had never received the data. A check revealed that the BuAer maüroom had received the reports late in the day; with no place to store them overnight, they opted to destroy them. A fast reprint was distributed. I also visited NACA with Grumman engineers to discuss the application of the area rule to the FllF-1 with Dick Whitcomb. When the airplane began flight tests, its performance was poor, due to high drag. I asked Whitcomb what the problem was, and he said they had not used his area rule, but that of another engineer. Bill Ligon Lynchburg, Va.

Glad to read about the Women's Auxiliary Ferry Squadron pilots flying out of Love Field ["They Also Served," July issue]. It may explain why there were still a few aircraft there, so I was able to school on BT-13s on entering U.S. Air Force aircraft maintenance training. Most of our instructors were exAAF and stul qualified. The aircraft my class worked had one "squawk" after its flight: The tau wheel would not unlock, so the pilot had to use the brakes to turn whue taxiing. Later, while I was stationed at Amarülo Air Force Base, one of my friends owned a BT. Whenever he flew over our house, he would always "exercise" the prop—and, yes, it was noisy. It was a sure way to identify him and his aircraft. Someone here in Texas still flies a Beech 18 from the San Antonio area to Wichita Falls. I stul love to hear that "round" engine sound the twin R-985s make! Sr. Master Sgt. Frank McDonald U.S. Air Force (ret) Morgan Mill, Texas

AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

We received quite a few letters pointing out the caption error. Thanks to all who wrote to set the record straight

Remembering Captain Stewart

Twin Trainer Confusion

The caption for the photo of three WAFS on Ugliest Airplanes P. 57 in the July issue has a double "howler." First, the UC-78 was a Cessna product, not a Beech. Second, the airplane shown isn't a UC-78. The long, rectangular window by Betsy Ferguson's left elbow identifies it as a Beech AT-11 bombardier trainer. If Ferguson wasn't in the picture, we would see an ugly, slab-sided extended nose terminating I noted the article in your May edition on in a Plexiglas bubble with a flat bom"The World's Ugliest Airplanes," by Stephan bardier's windscreen in the lower side. The Wilkinson. About five years ago I saw a Hamilton Standard counterweight prop and photo of the British AD Scout and made a the semi-buried exhaust stack ftirther idenl/32nd-scale balsa model (no plans) be- tify the bird as one of the numerous variacause it was certainly different (ugly). I've tions inflicted on the basic Beech Model 18, enclosed a photo of the model [shown rather than the Cessna. above]. Considering its aerodynamic defiIn fairness to the caption writer, the adjaciencies, I included an ambulance, nurse cent airplane, partially visible behind the and stretcher! AT-ll's landing gear, could be a UC-78 I am stül practicing medicine daily at (Cessna T-50, Bobcat, AT-8, AT-17, Bamboo nearly 86, and did private flying for 20 years. Bomber, Wichita Wobbler, Rhapsody in I also still make l/32nd-scale balsa models Glue, etc.). The squared-ofif chine and single fi'om photos or occasionally old plans—but fin and rudder would fit the Cessna. The no kits. I continue to enjoy your magazine. short, rounded nose nearly even with the Dr. Richard A. Mahrer plane of the prop rotation visible between San Jose, Calif. Ferguson and Florine Miller would also

6

support that identification. Unfortunately, those same features would also fit the Bobcat's rival and look-alike, the AT-10 (Beech Model 26). If we could see more of that plane, the Cessna's large square cabin windows would contrast with the Beech's small portholes. My kvetching aside, this was an intriguing if poignant story. It was good to see the long, tall heroinefinallysmUing on P. 59. Commander Frank L. Shelley U.S. Coast Guard (ret.) Santa Cruz, Calif.

A big mahalo for Richard L. Hayes' article in the March issue, "Mr. Stewart Goes to War." In reading it, I especially felt moved by the courage of our aircrewsflyingthose daytime raids over Germany. Jimmy Stewart was one of the thousands of leaders who set supreme examples of bravery for their crews. Enclosed is a photograph [above] of Captain Stewart and the crew of one of his B-24s, which includes my late uncle. Putt Borden, in the front row (with an "X" on his shoulder), next to Stewart. I don't know what Uncle Putt did aboard that Liberator, but he was one of the thousands of true heroes from the finest generation. Mike Powers Honolulu, Hawaii Send letters to Aviation History Editor, Weider History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500, or e-mail to [email protected].

BRIEFING

Kiwi P-40C Takes Wing

he C model of the evergreen Curtiss P-40 was a rare bird. Only 193 were built, a tiny percentage of the nearly 14,000 P-40s of aU marks. Often derided as obsolete, the P-40 continued to be manufactured even while North American, Lockheed and Republic were churning out superior fighters, so the old Hawk obviously had some useful qualities. The P-40C, sometimes called "Tomahawk," in fact had no such name; all USAAF P-40s were known generically as Warhawks. The Tomahawk (a British dubbing) was the slighdy different export equivalent of the C, of which 930 were built. That was the airplane that equipped the short-lived but iconic Flying Tigers. Many also went to the Soviet Union, handed over to Russian pilots in Alaska. The airplane you see here, restored over 25,000 man-hours in Auckland, New Zealand, by renowned warbird and vintage specialist Avspecs and taken for its first flight in April, was recovered as a wreck from northern Russia. Though it was actually a Tomahawk lib, it has been restored and painted as the 194th P-40C, complete with a functioning fuselage drop tank—the mark's prime identifying feature—but thankfully free of the cliché sharks teeth. Though there are numerous airworthy late P-40s, Avspecs' restoration is only the second P-40C that isflying,plus one P-40B; the other C is at the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Wash., and the B is in Duxford, England, part of The Fighter Collection. Notwithstanding the Kiwi restoration, the P-40 is owned by San Antonio oü-and-gas tycoon Rod Lewis, and was delivered to Texas in mid-2011 after its final proving night in New Zealand. Lewis has shunned the high visibility of such mega-warbirders as Paul Allen and Kermit Weeks by keeping his collection private, but he currently owns—and often flies in airshows—19 warbirds that range from Bearcat-based Reno racer Rare Bear (plus three stock Bearcats) to the famous recovered Greenland P-38 Glacier Girl. He also owns the world's onlyflyingA-20 Havoc, an original Tuskegee

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AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

Airmen AT-6 trainer and one each of the de rigueur P-39/P-40/ P-47/P-51/Corsair/Spitñre/Sea Fury gaggle. Lewis owns and flies nearly a dozen hard-working general aviation aircraft, including a Cessna Citation Sovereign bizjet, four helicopters and two utility turboprops—all of which help him drill for enough ou and gas to support his warbirds. Stephan Wilkinson

Jetman Over the Grand Canyon

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n May 7 Swiss "Jetman" Yves Rossy strapped on his homebullt carbon wing, ascended in a heiicopter 8,000 feet above tine rim of the Grand Canyon and ieaped into an eight-minute flight along the canyon's red sandstone ciiffs. Throttling with his four-engine, 120-pound wing, Rossy controlled his movements by shifting his head, shoulders and arms, all at speeds close to 200 mph. He made the flight over Hualapai tribal lands at Grand Canyon West to avoid excessive regulation. It was the first horizontal jetpack-powered flight above the Grand Canyon, and Rossy's first flight in the United States.

' Biplane

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or the British, the fictional aviator caiied Biggies was a combination of Smiiin' Jack, Steve Canyon and Sky King. Biggies starred in neariy 100 "Boy's Own" adventure novels written over 50 years by W.E. Johns, himself a World War i piiot, and the mythic Biggies fiew everything from an F.B.5 Gun Bus to a The "Biggies" B.E.2c replica, constructed Hawker Hunter. In the late 1960s, Universal Pictures set out to make a big-budget World War I fiim. Biggies Sweeps the Skies (ignoring the fact that an American audience would expect a movie about a butier with a broom). The studio commissioned the buiiding of four Royai Fiying Corps and German repiicas, inciuding a B.E.2c bipiane. A remarkabiy authentic-iooking mock B.E. was designed, built and flown within just four months in Engiand. Constructed using some Matthew Boddington helped de Haviiland Tiger Moth rebuild the mock B.E.2c.

components and a Gypsy

engine converted to run upright, the airplane never made it into cinema history. The movie was canceled when the other aircraft weren't finished in time to meet the shooting schedule in Algeria. The B.E.2C replica ended up in the U.S., flying in airshows before being badly damaged in a takeoff-stall crash in Wisconsin in 1977, and the crumpled parts went into storage for 25 "As far as fighting the Hun in years. In 2005 the wreck was the air is concerned, nothing shipped back to succeeds like boldness." Engiand, into the -James T.B. McCudden

using de Haviiland Moth components, returns to the air on May 10.

hands of Matthew Boddington, the son of the replica's creator. Boddington, a well-regarded vintage aircraft restorer, and his partner Steve Slater undertook the rebuiid in the same Northamptonshire shop in which father Charles Boddington had built the originai. Cn May 10, the mock B.E.2C fiew again for the first time in 34 years. Though not an exact copy, "Biggies' bipiane" is a remarkable evocation of one of the RFC's eariiest warpianes—a 1912 Geoffrey de Haviiland design that originally was controlled by wing-warping; the 2c version was the first to have aiierons. it was both famed and derided for its stabilitygood for a reconnaissance piatform but bad for taking on enemy fighters, as is obvious from its nickname, "Fokker Fodder." More chiilingiy, the Germans caiied the B.E.2c kaltes Fleisch—cold meat. Stephan Wilkinson

MYSTERY SHIP

Air Quotes

Can you identify this rocket-armed trainer? Turn to P. 12 for the answer. SEPTEMBER 2011

AVIATIOH HISTORY

9

BRIEFING

Vuican Returns Home

Forty-three years after it departed RAF Finninqley, Avro Vulcan XH558 touches down at the same field for a return engagement.

n the spring of 1993, the Royal Air Force's last Avro Vulcan soared gracefully above RAF Finningley in South Yorkshire with the message "Farewell" displayed on its bomb bay doors. After 33 years of service, it was making a final salute to the airfield where it had stood on nuclear-armed high alert during the Cold War. In 1996 Finningley itself closed, and the chances were sum that the bomber and base would ever be reunited. But on a hazy day this past March, XH558's unmissable delta wing reappeared in the skies over its former base, now Doncaster Sheffield Airport, before it alighted on the runway and taxied into Hangar 3, its home from 1961 to 1968. Former RAF squadron leader Martin Withers, whoflewVulcans from Finningley in the 1970s and who captained the first Vulcan mission to the Falkland Islands in the 1982 conflict, had the honor of piloting the subsonic bomber back to its old duty station. Owners Vulcan to the Sky Trust hope that locating the only remaining airworthy example of the delta-wing bomber at a commercial airport (its last base was RAF Lyneham) will deliver an increase in publicity, funds and visitors. It plans to develop Hangar 3 into a visitor center, with displays on the Vulcan's restoration, technology and role in the Cold War. The trust restored XH558 from 1997 to 2007, replacing all four of its original RoUs-Royce Olympus 202 engines with zero-hour units in storage since 1982. The big bomber is scheduled to appear at airshows across England during the 2011 season, and also perform a flyover at the Queen's Jubuee in London in 2012. The trust plans to fly it untu at least 2013, making the necessary repairs and modifications to the notoriously frague airframe along the way. (Though the Vulcan was innovative, metal fatigue limited its effectiveness—it could sustain only 30 minutes in a high-speed dash at low level.)

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10 AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

"Touching down at Finningley was one of the most emotional experiences of my professional life," Withers told the British press. For more information on XH558 and Vulcan to the Sky Trust, visit vulcantothesky.org. Stephen Mauro

n April 7 a colorful array of hot air balloons from across Europe gathered in Kent, Great Britain, to establish a brand-new entry in the Guinness World Records for the most hot air balloons to fly across the English Channel. Fifty-one balloons set off at 7 a.m., and all but one of them—waylaid by technical difficulties—touched down in Calais, France, four hours later, officially establishing the ballooning benchmark.

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BRIEFING

Sikorsky X2 Wins Coiiier or the second time, Sikorsky has earned the Robert J. Collier Trophy, awarded annually since 1910 for "the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America." Sikorsky's X2 team received the 2010 trophy for

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In the CoUier Trophy's centennial year, Sikorsky's X2 team faced some stiff competition, including the X-51A WaveRider scramjet—which set a record in 2009 for the longest atmospheric flight exceeding Mach 5—and Boeing's C-17A Glohemaster III cargo lifter, which was designed to take off and land on short runways. Development of the X2, described by a Sikorsky spokesman as "the result of a project to demonstrate that a helicopter can cruise comfortably at 250 knots while retaining excellent low-speed handling, efficient hovering and a seamless transition to high speed," began in 2005. Sikorsky recently announced a light attack/scout version of the X2, designated as the X-97 Raider, is in the works.

Sikorsky's X 2 advances helicopter technology.

developing a coaxial, auxiliary propulsion helicopter (it has a rear pusher prop) that has been clocked at an unofficial record speed of 250 knots. The X2 featuresfly-by-wireflightcontrols and active vibration control. Sikorsky won itsfirstCollier Trophy in 2002 for its X-92 helicopter, a twin-engine, four-bladed, medium-lift chopper.

Web Pick: aerofiles.com viation buffs searching for a one-stop, A-to-Z compendium of every airplane and helicopter produced in North America need look no further than this website. Unlike Wikipedia, which lacks entries for a number of more obscure aircraft, K.O. Eckland's Aerofües has hard data on a comprehensive list of production types, organized by manufacturer. Besides a photograph of most of the airplanes listed, the site provides pertinent specs such as horsepower, maximum service load, speed, unit cost and total produced. It also contains easily accessible, exhaustive pages on civilian airlines, air museums, aviator biographies, civil airports and engine types.

A

MYSTERY SHIP ANSWER Today the U.S. Air Force is looking for a Light Attack/ Armed Reconnaissance (LAAR) aircraft for duty in Afghanistan, but that concept is far from new. In Juiy 1951, at the height of the Korean War, the Air Force evaluated several smali aircraft as "armed trainers" for iight ciose-support work. The Temco T-35 Buckaroo shown here was one of these, aiong with the Beech T-34 Mentor and the Fletcher FD-25 Defender. Possibiy because it was a taii-dragger in an era when tricycie gear ruled, the T-35 lost out in the fiy-off competition that seiected the T-34 as the next Air Force primary trainer, repiacing the T-6 Texan. Totai T-35 production numbered just 13 pianes, including 10 for Saudi

12 AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

Arabia. Losing the trainer contract didn't prevent Temco—Texas Engineering & Manufacturing Company Inc., a successor to Globe Aircraft and later the "T" in LTV Corp.—from oftering an armed version of the Buckaroo, modified to mount two .30-caliber machine gun pods, up to 10 5-inch rockets or two 150-pound bombs. This was a coiossai ioad for such a smaii ship. Temco used its fighter-like Globe Swift Model GC-1B, one of the nicest general aviation ships, as the basis for the Buckaroo, which was offered with a 145-hp Continental C145-2ÍH or a 165-hp Franklin 6A4-165-B3 engine. According to Ken Coughlin of the Swift Museum Foundation in Athens, Tenn., there are four surviving T-35s, two of them in the hands of the foundation. Robert F. Dorr

By Stephan Wilkinson

MILESTONES The First Airliner to Go Supersonic

knew that pullout fi'om the dives o, it wasn't the Concorde, with shock-waved elevators at the nor was it the Tupolev potential Mach 1.03 speed were in Tu-144 "Koncordski." The let's-give-it-a-shot territory, since first airliner to exceed the DC-8 had only been flightMach 1 was a near-stock Douglas tested to Mach 0.95, its neverDC-8. And just to rub it in, the exceed speed. So each dive began Diesel Eight carried the livery of a with the DC-8's stabilizer already Canadian airline: Canadian Pacific. trimmed up. This meant that it It happened five decades ago, 15 took a substantial 50 foot-pounds years before the Concorde would of force on the yoke to maintain carry its first paying passengers. the dive. The only change to tlie faster-than- A U.S. Air Force F-104 Starfighter flies aiongside a Dougias Accompanied by a Lockheed sound DC-8's airframe or engines DC-8, in 1961 tests that saw the airliner push past Mach 1. F-104 Starfighter paceplane as was an experimental, spanwide, 4percent extension of the wing leading edge, that the airplane broke the existing altitude well as a North American F-lOO Super Sabre which was being tried not to make the air- record for loaded jet transports on the same photoplane, the Douglas DC-8 thundered through Mach 1.012, for a true airspeed of plane faster but to extend its range. The test flight during which it went supersonic. As revealed by a Douglas document pub- 662.5 mph, at 39,614 feet. The pilot mainplane took off from the Douglas factory at Long Beach, Calif., on August 21, 1961, lished on the website of DC-8 enthusiast tained takeoff thrust throughout the dive, a loaded with enough ballast and fuel that it Fred Cox (dc-8jet.com), the test program good indication of how much power and weighed 170,600 pounds when it reached was to gently push over into descents of 15, momentum it takes to bull an airliner top-of-climb at 50,000 feet—heavy enough 20 and 25 degrees of dive angle. Douglas through the sound barrier, "t"

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AVIATDRS

By Sonja Dewing

Testing B-29s on the Fly Flying Superforts fresh from the assembly line could be a dangerous job

opilot Norman Jacobshagen raised the alarm at the end of the threehour test flight. After flipping the switch to lower the B-29's landing gear, he called over the intercom, "Ken, the indicator light isn't coming on." Jacobshagen flicked the switch up and down again, then pilot Kenneth Nul tried the emergency landing gear switch. No response. The test flight engineer that day was my grandfather, Roy "Bud" Dewing. He recalled that each time they nipped the switch to drop the gear, he anticipated the sudden onset of drag that normally occurred whenever the big bomber's 56-inch tires were lowered into the airstream. But despite repeated attempts to extend the gear, tlie feel of the aircraft never changed. With the rest of the crew listening in. Nul radioed the tower and explained the problem. Tower personnel quickly confirmed that the B-29's landing gear was not down, adding that they would alert rescue crews and have them standing by. NiU would have to bring the 75,000-pound bomber in for a belly landing on a cement runway. Dewing calculated the amount of fuel they needed to burn off before they tried to touch down, tJien instructed Niü to circle the airfield. The rest of the team, meanwhue, prepared for a dangerous landing. Just a few months earlier, in November 1943, a bit of luck and a lot of elbow grease had landed 24-year-old Bud Dewing his job as a flight engineer at Boeing's Wichita plant, working with the first B-29 flight test crews. His friend Fred Auchter had recommended him for the B-29 program, but Bud had to prove himself before he got the job. He spent months familiarizing himself vnth every dial and switch, answering questions on the fly from chief test pilot E.M. Allison and learning how to start the engines as well as keep them running efficiently.

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14 AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

Roy "Bud" Dewinq occupies the flight engineer's position, at right, as a brand-new B-29 Superfortress from Boeing's piant in Wichita, Kan., undergoes flight-testing.

Happy tliat his new job supported the war eftort. Bud was eager to do even more. Years later he recalled a day in February 1944 when he and his crewmates, along with another test crew, were hanging out in the lounge, listening to Glenn Miller on the radio whue they waited for an aircraft to be readied. Harry Johnson and Deane Cunningham had been playing table tennis that day when Roland Miller made a stirring speech about enlisting in the Army Air Forces and flying B-29s in the military theater, instead of just testing them in the States. Miller's speech hit home for Bud, whose brother was then serving overseas. That same day "Boo" Paschal, Cunningham, Miller and Dewing headed downtown to the Army recruiting office.

"We'd like to sign up for the Army Air Forces, working with the B-29s," Miller told the recruiter. "Why is that?" the recruiter asked. Miller explained their training and all the hours they'd spent checking out the big bombers. Obviously they were well qualified, but the recruiter just shook his head and said: "Son, if I sign any of you up, the Army in its infinite wisdom will end up putting you in as cooks. You boys are better off exacfly where you are." The Boeing employees left the recruiting office with mixed feelings. Bud was relieved because he'd be able to stay home with his wife and kids. But he was also disappointed to hear that the Army likely wouldn't appreciate his talents if he enlisted. Dewing was happy to continue flight-test-

Boeing test personnel—inciuding Dewing, at left in back row—gather for a group photo.

ing B-29s, however, a job that was doubly important with so many bombers that still needed work coming off the assembly lines. To complete its test run, each new airplane required 2V2 hours on its engines, three takeoffs and three landings. Any squawks (problems reported) had to be quickly resolved by the mechanics. Many bombers were delivered to the USAAF within days of assembly. Engine overheating was a constant concern, but less so than in combat theaters since the test hops were short and they weren't carrying any loads. There were some major surprises, Mke the time one test team reported seeing a "propeller fly ofï the airplane's wing and hurtle toward the ground." And then there was that memorable day when Bud and his team made a belly landing. Dewing was sitting in the flight engineer's position, facing the back of the plane, as they neared the runway. He watched through a small window as the ground rose up to meet them. Then he felt the big bomber's nose pitch up, as Ken Nul pulled back on the yoke. After that, the sounds and sensations all collided. Bud felt the sudden loss of momentum as the B-29 slammed into the runway, pressing him into his seat. The propellers dug into the cement runway, and the aircraft skidded to a stop. He could hear the rescue vehicle sirens coming closer. The next thing Bud knew, he and the rest of the crew had escaped out the emergency hatch and dropped to the ground. Quickly moving away from the bomber, they saw that its fuselage had been shredded. It was clear to everyone that NiU's experience as a

the controls, testing out the systems. Cunningham returned and stood behind Bud as they circled the runway, but he never asked for the controls. After so many flights in the engineer's seat. Bud was thrilled to get a chance to land the big bomber. That flight inspired him to take pilot training, and within months he had obtained his private pilot's license. As the war came to an end, the flight test crews dwindled. Bud and the remaining crewmen realized their days with Boeing were numbered. On September 20, 1945, they tested their last B-29s. Most stayed involved with aviation after that, some continuing with Boeing in other capacities and a few opening private airports. Bud managed a gas station for a time before he took a security job at Los Alamos, N.M. During the Apollo missions, he worked for NASA in quality control, making sure that computer programs, space suits and other gear functioned correctly. While with NASA, he even received the coveted Silver Snoopy award for his work. He later worked for the Defense Atomic Support Agency, traveling around the world to inspect equipment. My grandfather has always appreciated a challenge. Learning on the fly how things worked, then inspecting them to make sure they were functioning properly, was a great job for him. His experience with testing B-29s turned out to be just the beginning of a long and rewarding career. Today, at 93, he enjoys retirement with his wife Leone in Rio Rancho, N.M. "t"

pilot had kept them alive that day. At one point Dewing's team also took part in a short-lived trial of midair refiieling. It involved a technique conceived in England in the 1930s known as the looped-hose method. On the receiving end of the fuel transfer, a B-29 crew harpooned out a rope that trailed behind the aircraft. At the end of the rope was a grapnel, as well as a small parachute meant to hold the rope as steady as possible. The refueling aircraft trailed its own rope, which was connected to a metal fuel transfer hose. When the two ropes joined up, a crewman in the receiving plane manually cranked the rope and hose in. It turned out that the B-29's cruising speed—upwards of 200 mph—exerted too much stress on the hoses, which fractured during each refueling attempt. Sections as large as 40 to 50 feet would sometimes break away. Looking back on those experiments. Bud smiled as he commented, "I'm sure that farmers all over Wichita were scratching their heads, wondering where those do^one metal hoses were coming from." On another B-29 test flight Deane Cunningham, who was serving as the pilot, went to take a nap in the tunnel that connected the cockpit fore and aft sections while Bud was at Dewing stands at right as the USAAF accepts its iast B-29.

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATIOH HISTORY

15

RESTDRED

By Paul J. Fournier

Last of the Breed An old-time bush pilot holds the line on Maine's Moosehead Lake

tail, lean, weathered woodsman with trim white beard, Roger Currier is one of the last of the old-time Maine bush pilots. He stul plies his craft from Greenville Junction, on Moosehead Lake, using a fleet of vintage radial-engine aircraft that he personally restored and maintains. He's been at it now for more than a quarter-century, surviving in a profession that has deep-sixed many others. The quiet cove on Moosehead Lake where Currier's operation is based is one of the few places left where you can still hear waves hitting pontoons in concert with the deep rumble of radial engines. Currier's fleet includes two Cessna 195s that are more than 60 years old. He thinks they're the only ones stül in commercial operation—especially on floats. Built in the post-World War II period between 1947 and '54, the five-seat 195 was marketed as the "Businessliner" by Cessna. Its high standards of looks and comfort made it akin to an airborne Cadillac, the epitome of luxury in its day. Today the stylish 195 is a much-sought-after classic on the used aircraft market. The two 1948-vintage Cessna 195s in Currier's fleet (he also has a de Havüland Beaver and Cessna 180 in hisflyingservice) are powered by Jacobs 7-cylinder radial engines. The 195 was Cessna's flrst all-aluminum aircraft, and the last to be certified for radiais. Currier has completely restored the 195s (plus a third he keeps on wheels at his winter home in New Hampshire), and does all the airframe and engine maintenance himself The Jacobs radiais have been out of production since the 1970s. They boast a venerable heritage, starting in 1933, and have powered a variety of military and civilian aircraft up to and including WWII: Beech Staggerwings, Stearmans, Wacos and many others. During the 1980s, Currier's bush flying operation—^hauling hunters, fishermen and

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16 AVIATION HISTORY SEPTEMBER 2011

Roger Currier prepares to take off from Moosehead Laice in his Cessna 195 fioatpiane.

campers; serving the logging industry; and flying for the state fish and wudlife department—^was in need of an airplane with better capabilities than the Cessna 180s he had in his stable. The obvious upgrade would have been a Cessna 206 Stationaire. But Currier didn't like the way most 206s were configured, nor was he particularly happy with their performance and price. A friend of his had a 195 that he fixed up and had a set of floats for, so Currier took a gamble and bought it. "I found that it would do most everything that a 206 would do," he said. "And it didn't cost as much." The first 195 was in reasonably good shape. Currier was pleased enough with it that later, when another 195 became available, he bought it too. That one, acquired from a Canadian owner in the 1990s, "needed a lot of restoration work just to get it up to our standards," he said. "One example was repainting and corrosion work. The plane started its life

in Louisiana for an oil company before being used commercially in Canada. When we imported it, the plane was sporting a paint job done with a paintbrush!" The key to his business' survival is that Currier's enterprise is pretty much self-contained. He does almost everything himself except running the office (his wife. Sue, handles booking reservations and radio communications). A long-time A&P mechanic who served in the U.S. Air Force, Currier has plenty of experience in reviving classics. As for those ancient Jacobs radiais, he said, "You gotta make friends with 'em." He pointed out that the old "round" engines require a bit of special handling and knowledge: "They re not without their problems, and I think they could be classified as high maintenance." Currier has a remarkably well-equipped repair facility where he rebuilds his own engines. He claims that the radiais are, surprisingly, the least expensive to rebuild.

"Originally when they were manufactured, they were designed to be very rugged," he explained. "In a Jacobs engine many parts, like valves and pistons, can be used over again as long as they mic up properly. Parts are getting in short supply now. There's a couple of outfits that are starting to manufacture some of the parts." The Jacobs he uses in the 195s are the 275and 300-hp versions, basically the same engine witli a few minor variations. He keeps several spare engines, pickled in airworthy condition, for change-outs as needed. Given his many years' experience with radiais, Roger doesn't believe in running them to TBO (recommended time before overhaul) of 1,200 hours on the Jacobs and 1,600 hours on the Pratt & Whitneys. "We try to make it a policy to not run them over 1,000 hours," he said. "Because I've found from other people's experience that you are more prone to catastrophic failures when you get up there in high time. Plus some of the parts start to wear and there's a lot of looseness in the engine, and you end up ruining more parts because they just wear beyond Hmits. "You take a part that is in a bushing, and the bushing wears out, then all of a sudden the part starts to wear. If you can catch it before the part wears out, it's a 50-cent bushing. If the part wears out, now you've got an $800 part to replace." Currier believes that in an operation such as his, "where I'm running them myself and maintaining them myself, problems are pretty much at a minimum. During the first few years we had our share of surprises, but we learned from the surprises. We know what not to do and what to do." For example, an experienced mechanic told him that he should always park the airplane with the propeller straight up and down. Wrong! "At one point one of our propeller blades started to hang up," he recalled, "and we found that the [bearing] race was cracked and there was no seal and the water was running down in thef'e. So you don't park these things with the propeller vertical. You park with it horizontal. You notice down on the dock, all my propellers are horizontal!" During the winter off-season. Currier spends a good deal of time maintaining his fleet and helping his friends work on their classic aircraft. He bought his third 195, on wheels, from a friend "who had acquired it as a wreck from an insurance company. He

stripped the engine, iristruments and avionics from it and sold the wreckage to us as spare parts. Being that it was the 11th from last one Cessna built, I felt inspired to rebuild it. It took two years and many hours to complete, but it's a great flying airplane." Then a fourth 195 came into Currier's sphere: "A couple of years ago a new neighbor moved in near me in New Hampshire at Windsock Village. He brought with him the last 195 ever built. He and I have become good friends, and I have helped him with maintenance on his." In addition to 195s, Currier has also restored a couple of classic gullwing Stinson Reliants. That airplane has a venerable tradition in Maine: The very first puot hired by the Maine Forest Service in the early 1930s, Earle Crabbe, flew a Reliant, as did the first Maine warden puot. Bill Turgeon. Currier owned and rebuut a military V-77 Reliant that had spent World War II in England as a trainer. He has also rebuilt and maintains a civilian SR-7 owned by one of his winter New Hampshire neighbors. Currier's aviation career began when he took flying lessons under the G.L Bul after returning to New Hampshire from the Air Force. He obtained private, commercial and instrument ratings. At one point during his training he bought a "fixer-upper" plane. "We had a snowless winter, and I used to land on wheels on the frozen rivers and lakes," he recalled. "This made me want to get into flying on skis and maybe floats. I came up to Twitchell's [Flying Service, in Turner, Maine] and bought an Aeronca Champ on skis, and put it on floats in the springtime. And I found that was the type offlyingthat I liked to do." Interested in flying floatplanes commercially. Currier chose Maine over Alaska, moving his family to Moosehead Lake in 1982. After working for a couple of other flying outfits, he bought some land at Greenville Junction on West Cove and began building his business. He constructed a couple of large hangars and also increased his fleet. At the service's peak, he and several hired pilots flew between 1,000 and 1,200 hours annually. Given the recent economic slump. Currier said he's down to 500-600 hours a year. He now does the bulk of the flying himself, specializing in sightseeing excursions to show off Maine's wudlife and gorgeous scenery—both of which Moosehead has in abundance, "t"

Roger works on a de Havilland Beaver's radial.

One of the Stinson

Currier climbs aboard his Beaver floatplane.

Home base in Greenville Junction, West Cove.

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTOnV 17

EXTREMES

By Robert Guttman

Engineering Overkiii Germany's "Bomber B" program probably contributed more to victory than any other Luftwaffe project—Allied victory, that is he Germans have long been known for their engineering genius, but it cotild sometimes be carried to counterproductive extremes. Such was the case with the "Bomber B" program initiated in July 1939, an extremely ambitious project to replace the medium bomber types then in Luftwaffe service. The Bomber B was to offer considerably higher speed and altitude performance, as well as more formidable offensive and defensive armament. The two leading contenders were the Focke-Wulf Fw-191 and Junkers Ju-288. Both were extremely advanced in concept, featuring pressurized crew compartments for high-altitude operations and remotely controlled defensive armament. And both were hamstrung by overly complex engineering. The otherwise-promising Fw-191 was handicapped from the outset by the insistence of the German air ministry (Reichsluftfahrfministerium, or RLM) on two fatal criteria: that it be powered by only two engines, and that it be designed to have every conceivable function operated electrically. As a result, the bomber was encumbered with hundreds of pounds of servo motors and wiring. What's more, the Junkers Jumo 222 power plants the airplane was designed to use never materialized, so the prototype had to make do with a pair of considerably less powerful engines. Inevitably the bomber turned out to be overweight and underpowered. Focke-Wulf proposed a simplified version, with more suitable hydraulic and pneumatic systems and four engines instead of two. It was a solution not dissimilar to the one employed by Britain's A.V. Roe, which salvaged its ill-starred twin-engine Manchester bomber by turning it into the highly successful fourengine Lancaster. Unlike the British Air Ministry, however, the RLM refused to accept such a straightforward engineering solution. Instead it simply canceled the project.

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18 AVIATION HISTORY

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The Junkers Ju-288 suffered from unrealistic specifications and overiy compiex design.

Part of the reason for the Fw-19rs cancellation was that the German high command favored the Junkers design. In the end, however, the Ju-288 degenerated into an even greater technological quagmire than its Focke-Wulf rival. Bearing no resemblance to its predecessor, the famously versatile Ju-88, the Ju-288 was to be a fast high-altitude bomber, but also function equally well in such varied roles as torpedo bomber, dive bomber and photoreconnaissance platform. Like the Fw-191, the Ju-288 was designed to be powered by a pair of 2,500-hp Jumo 222 engines, a type that had yet to be perfected, let alone enter production. The bomber's three crewmen were housed in a compact, pressurized capsule in the nose, where they were expected to perform multiple tasks: piloting, bomb aiming, navigation, radio communications and air defense. The 39-inch-wide compartment into which they were shoehorned made the infamously cramped cockpit of Handley Page's Hampton bomber seem positively spacious by comparison. The first Ju-288 prototype flew on No-

vember 29, 1940. Since the Jumo 222s were not yet available, it was fitted with lowerpowered BMW 801 air-cooled radiais, simuar to those used on the Fw-190. The underpowered prototype was destroyed in a crashlanding brought about by an engine fire, the first of many such mishaps that would plague its successors. As if the engine problems weren't serious enough, the Ju-288's landing gear proved—• literally—to be another chronic weakness. Several prototypes came to grief when their undercarriages collapsed upon landing. It wasn't untu 1942, several prototypes later, that a pair of Jumo 222s finally became available for flight-testing. The water-cooled engine boasted six banks of four cylinders per bank, arranged in the form of a hexagon around a common crankshaft. In front of the power plant was a large annular radiator, concealed behind an equally large ducted propeller spinner that reduced drag'but also promoted overheating. Despite its great promise, the extremely complex Jumo 222 never proved to be very reliable—but Junkers

never gave up trying to perfect it. By the time the manufacturer finally managed to get the bugs out, it was too late. Only 289 of the engines were ever completed, and none was installed in a production aircraft. Once again rejecting the simple expedient of redesigning the bomber's wings to incorporate four engines in individual nacelles, the RLM came up with a different engine solution in the form of the Daimler-Benz DB 606, which was almost as unsatisfactory as the Jumo 222. The DB 606 consisted of a pair of V-12 liquid-cooled DB 601 engines, the type installed in the Messerschmitt Me-109E, coupled together onto a common driveshaft. It offered nearly as much power as the perfected Jumo 222, but weighed half a ton more. The DB 606 was already in use in the infamous Heinkel He-177 heavy bomber, with which it had established a reputation for mechanical problems, maintenance headaches and inflight engine fires. In the United States, the Allison Engine Company came up with a somewhat similar power plant at roughly the same time as Daimler-Benz. It coupled two of its V-1710 engines—the liquid-cooled V-12 installed in the Army Air Forces' P-38, P-39, P-40 and P-51 fighters—into the monstrous 24-cylinder V-3420. Unlike the Germans, however, the Americans realized the impracticality of installing such a massive, complicated engine in a frontline combat plane, regardless of its power output, and terminated the program. Despite the Ju-288's power problems, the RLM and the Junkers engineering staff persisted with efforts to refine it. Apparently conceding the inefficiency of the three-man crew crammed into the narrow confines of the Ju-288's pressurized cabin. Junkers redesigned it with a larger and more spacious compartment that had room for four. Wider than the rest of the fuselage, the bulbous new nose compartment made the bomber look somewhat like a flying tadpole. In addition to installing three different types of engines and two different crew cabins, the Ju-288 project went through three different fuselages, two sets of tau surfaces and three entirely different wing designs. There were also a variety of arrangements for defensive and offensive armament. Each of the 22 flying prototypes was different, and none was ever judged entirely satisfactory. Undoubtedly the most bizarre of the many permutations proposed for the Ju-288 was an

anti-shipping version. Possibly learning about the successes the USAAF had achieved attacking Japanese ships with North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers armed with a 75mm cannon, the Germans proposed a similarly armed version of the Ju-288. The Germans, however, intended their ship-killer to pack nothing less than a 14-inch single-shot recoüless cannon. The idea was that the puot would execute a diving attack and fire his battleship-sized shell through the armored decks of Allied warships. That version of the Ju-288 was never built, so no Luftwaffe aircrew was ever called upon to try it out. After the expenditure of 84 million Reichsmarks—the most expensive aircraft development program undertaken by Germany during the war—and untold man-hours, the Ju-288 project wasfinallyterminated in mid1944. By that time the Luftwaffe finally realized that Germany needed defensive fighters more than it needed offensive bombers. Moreover, by then the Luftwaffe had developed the world's first jet-powered combat airplanes, including Junkers' own four-jet Ju-287 bomber, making any version of the Ju-288 that could ever achieve production already obsolete. In many ways the Ju-288 was analogous to the much larger American Boeing B-29. Both airplanes were highly advanced and innovative, incorporating cutting-edge technology in the design of their pressurized cabins, engines and remotely controlled defensive armament systems. Unlike the B-29, however, the Ju-288 program was never able to produce a viable production aircraft. In terms of the German war effort, the Ju-288's failure was as great as if all the time, money and effort expended by Boeing and the USAAF had failed to produce the superbomber capable of bombing Japan into submission. Considered objectively, the entire Bomber B program in general, and particularly the Ju-288, made a far greater contribution to the Allied cause than to the Nazi war effort. It did so by virtue of the vast amount of resources the project absorbed, which could otherwise have been put to more effective use. After spendingfiveyears, countless man-hours and vast sums of money on the project, all the Luftwaffe had to show for its trouble was 22 unsatisfactory prototypes, a handful of which briefly flew reconnaissance missions on the Eastern Front. "Í"

Focke-Wulf's Fw-191 was overweight and underpowered, leading to its cancellation.

The Ju-288 V5's ducted spinner streamlined the engine nacelle but promoted overheating.

The Jumo 222, the Ju-288's intended power plant, had 24 cylinders arranged hexagonaliy.

While the Ju-288 was still under development, the Ju-287 jet bomber rendered it obsolete.

ER 2011

AVIATION HISTORY 19

LETTER FRDM AVIATIDN HISTDRY Overcoming vs. Overreaching In their push to advance the state of the art, airplane designers often reach a point where performance aspirations run headlong into engineering or manufacturing realities. Two articles in this issue demonstrate that sometimes designers overcome those realities, and sometimes they don't. In his story about the troubled development of the B-29 Superfortress (P. 22), Stephan Wilkinson recounts how Boeing, faced with using an engine that had a nasty tendency to catchfire,forged ahead with testing and production, eventually turning out nearly 4,000 of the heavy bombers. There was a war on, after all, and the need to take the fight to the Japanese Home Islands eclipsed all other considerations. By the time Japan surrendered following the destruction of its industry by Twentieth Air Force B-29s and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by "Süverplate" Superfortresses, the engine problems had been largely worked out—^but not before thousands of B-29 crewmen had paid the ultimate price. A far different outcome awaited the developers of the Junkers Ju-288, as Robert Guttman explains in "Extremes" (P. 18). Saddled with unreThe Commemorative Air Force B-29 Fifi wili be alistic performance expectations and, like the B-29, with a complex appearing at airshows this summer and faii. engine that still had a lot of bugs to work out, German engineers turned out prototype after prototype—all ofwhich were deemed unsatisfactory. In the end, after spending the equivalent of 20 million wartime dollars, the Germans canceled the project, with nothing to show for it but the prototypes. The Commemorative Air Force, operator of Fifi, the sole B-29 stillflying,knows only too well the challenges associated with the bomber's problematic Wright R-3350 engines. In 2005, following a series of engine failures. Fifi was grounded pending a complete power plant refit. As crew chief Dave Miller told AVweb, the R-3350 "was a poor design; it was rushed into service just like the airplane. It had a lot of problems with overheating—none that they could ever correct." The GAF solved those problems by custom building hybrid engines that combined elements of two R-3350 models, and modifying Fifi's engine mounts and cowlings to accommodate them. After two years of work and the expenditure of $ 1.2 million, donated by Gavanaugh Flight Museum owner Jim Gavanaugh, the re-engined bomber returned to the skies in August 2010. This summer and fall it's making appearances at EAA AirVenture and several other airshows across the country. At select stops a few lucky individuals will have the opportunity to take a shortflightin Fifi. With prices ranging lrom $595 to $ 1,495 (for the bombardier's position), it's an opportunity that doesn't come cheap—but once-in-a-lifetime experiences rarely do. Visit cafb29b24.org for more info, "i"

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATIOH HISTORY

21

'S Achilles' Heel Long revered as the airplane that won the Pacific War, the B-29 was a cranky, complex machine with a fire-prone engine By Stephan Wilkinson

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rowing up during World War II, my longer than an hour without becoming a vivid window on a world afire was bonfire." But it was wartime, and never has as Life magazine, the gritty, you-are- flawed and expensive a major weapons systhere, large-format photojournal- tem—arguably the ultimate weapons system ism pioneer. "The Mighty Superfortress" of the entire Pacific War—been knowingly became a star in Life's firmament as soon as deployed in as incomplete and imperfect a the big bomber flew its first combat missions state of development. "We need it for this war, in June 1944, and between the adulation of not the next one," USAAF General Henry H. war correspondents and the near-weekly ñiU- "Hap" Arnold at one point griped. At a point, page Boeing advertisements extolling the in fact, when it looked entirely possible that capabilities of its new superbomber, you'd he wouldn't get the B-29 for either war; develhave thought—^weU, certainly an 8-year-old opment, testing and production were going would have thought—that four-engine, so badly that serious consideration was given swoosh-taOed, polished-aluminum perfec- to ditching the entire program despite the tion had taken wing in Seattle. muHons already spent. It didn't hurt that the B-29 was the most The grim joke among B-29 crewmen was beautifiil bomber ever built. What could pos- that more of them were being killed by sibly be wrong with an airplane that looked Curtiss-Wright, the makers of the B-29's big like it had been designed by Raymond radial engines, than by the Japanese. Only it Loewy? From the symmetrical cigar of a wasn't a joke. Four hundred and fourteen fuselage unbroken even by a conventional B-29s were lost bombing Japan—147 of stepped windscreen to the tips of its impossi- them to flak and Japanese fighters, 267 to bly long, gracefiJly tapered wings, the B-29 engine fires, mechanical failures, takeoff was the antithesis of the locomotive-like crashes and other "operational losses." Do the British four-engine bombers and the gawky math and you'll see that for every B-29 lost to German monstrosities. We had seen the fu- the enemy, almost two were lost to accidents ture, and it worked. and crashes. Or did it? The Superfort was born back when civilIn fact the B-29 was such a dangerous air- ians stiU thought the yellow-winged Martin plane that had it been peacetime, only one or B-10 was the bee's knees. In the late 1930s, two XB-29 prototypes would have been built the Army General Staff was stiU made up of before the U.S. Army Air Forces said, "No ex-artülery and -infantry officers who undermoney for you, Boeing, come back in five stood little about strategic warfare, but they years when you have something that'll fly believed we needed a "hemispheric defense 22

AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

Fifi, the sole B-29 still flying, never fails to impress airshow audiences. The Commemorative Air Force bomber returned to the air in 2010 following a compiete engine refit with hybrid Wright R-3350s.

bomber"—a very-long-range airplane that could defend the United States during a European war by launching from the safety of U.S. bases, since it was assumed that the British Isles would quickly fall to the Germans. It also needed to fly far enough to defend Alaska and Hawaii, well beyond the range of bombed-up B-17s, and there was also the thought that the Germans might try to attack the U.S. from bases in Africa and even South America. The first round of responses to the War Department's perceived need were designs Uke the Douglas XB-19 and Boeing's own XB-15—gargantuan, vulnerable, underpowered inflations of conventional airplanes. It was a time when airfi-amers paid out of their own pockets to engineer prototypes, hoping that maybe they'd get a production contract out of it. Boeing, in fact, was a small company on the ropes because the Army Air Corps had

decided it only needed a few B-17s and had canceled plans for a large production run. If nothing else, however, the XB-15 did prove to Boeing engineers that they'd need to greatly reduce drag and increase lift if they were ever to build a superbomber. Boeing bravely decided on its own to start serious work on just such an airplane. By August 1939, after seven major iterations of the design, the company had settled on the B-29's predecessor, the Model 341. By December it had buut a wooden mockup and had a substantial jump on the competition when the Air Corps issued an official request for very-long-range bomber proposals at the end of January 1940. Boeing needed to add self-sealing fuel tanks, increased armor and more and heavier guns—all as the result of lessons learned during the early air war over Europe—refining what became the B-29. One key to the design's success was the very-

high-lift, low-drag wing that Boeing developed—much like the Consolidated B-24 Liberator's unique "Davis wing"—with sophisticated Fowler flaps, at the time a high-tech innovation, to make the wing work at takeoff and landing speeds. Unfortunately, there was only one engine that potentially had the power and fuel efficiency to turn a B-29-size airframe into a contender, and everybody knew it. Lockheed, Douglas, Martin and Consolidated all specified the same engine in their ultimately unsuccessftil superbomber proposals. This seemingly ideal power plant was an 18-cylinder, two-row radial, the Wright R-3350, the highest-displacement production engine in the world at the time. The early 3350s were said to produce 2,000 hp at a time when half that horsepower was respectable for a production RoUs-Royce Merlin or Allison V-12, and the big radial seemed to be

remarkably fuel-efficient. The famous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 would not run for another two years. Furthermore, it lacked the R-3350's power and, particularly, its specific fuel consumption. What could be more appropriate for a long-range, heavy-lift bomber? Nor was the R-3350 an overstressed variant of an existing design, but rather a new engine with considerable growth potential. In fact the Wright R-3350 would eventually put out a relatively reliable 3,400 hp in airliner service in the 1950s (3,700 in military applications), powering Lockheed Super Constellations and Douglas DC-7Cs, not to mention the Douglas AD and A-1 Skyraider, the dependable "Spad" of Korean and Vietnam war fame. Curtiss-Wright had first rim the R-3350 in 1937, and it had been casually tested in a number of low-altitude, low-load applications, but the company was far busier build-

SEPTEMBER 2011

AVIATION HISTORY

23

ing R-1820s for B-17s and DG-3s as well as developing the twin-row R-2600 for a wide variety of wartime applications. Between 1937 and 1942, Wright managed to produce about two dozen running R-3350S, all with serious reduction-gear, cooling and exhaust-valve problems. The huge R-3350 at least initially became the company's redheaded stepchild. In the 'teens and 1920s, Curtiss had been a liquid-cooled engine pioneer, but by the 1930s, after its merger with Wright, the manufacturer of Lindbergh's classic Whirlwind radial, Gurtiss' Wright engine division became an air-cooled company, designing and building R-1820s as well as smaller and larger radiais for everything As a B-29 starts its engines on Saipan, a ground firom trainers to torpedo bombers. The crewman stands ready to use a fire extinguisher. R-3350 seemed to be a natural part of this progression. But in 1939, for some reason, gine program of the entire war, the same Wright Aeronautical got distracted and engineers were reeled back to the R-3350 decided to develop the 42-cylinder, liquid- project, thus dooming the Tornado to an cooled Tornado, one of the most complex air- early and weU-deserved death. craft engines ever conceived. The Tornado The most notorious B-29 test flight crash had six in-line rows of seven cylinders each, was not caused by an engine fire, though arranged in an asterisk pattern around a cen- there's an urban legend to that effect. In tral crankshaft. February 1943, Boeing test pilot Eddie The Tornado was intended for the Lock- AUen was making his ninth night in the heed XP-58 Ghain Lightning, one example of number-two XB-29 prototype. Allen which finally flew in 1944, but with Allison V-3420 engines. Unfortunately, development of the Tornado sapped engineering talent fi-om the R-3350. And then, when R-3350 development and production suddenly became the single most important aircraft en-

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BATCHELOR

24 AVIATION HISTORY SEPTEMBER 2011

was that rare individual, an engineer who was also a test pilot. He was also the most experienced four-engine pilot in the country, probably the world, with substantial left-seat time in Boeing's Model 314flyingboats, as well as the pressurized Boeing Stratoliner, of course B-17s and now the B-29. In fact he was the only person to have flown the Superfort as pilot in command. AUen knew perfectly well what he was dealing with, which alone makes him one I of the bravest test pilots ever. After the first t flight of the XB-29, on September 21, I 1942, his only public comment was, "It "" flies." Perhaps he was being cooUy reticent, but for a test pilot to be so apparently unenthusiastic might be the equivalent of saying, "I've flown worse, though I can't remember when..." By the time of his fatal flight, Allen had already aborted one XB-29 test with an engine on fire and two more about to blow, choking smoke in the cockpit and a need to get on the ground fast enough that he landed downwind. The USAAF considered the situation so dire that AUen and his crew had every 1 right to bau out, so it awarded him a rare civilian Air Medal for choosing instead to save the priceless prototype. On February 18, AUen had already aborted the flight because of a by-

then routine engine fire—extinguished by the CO2 fire bottle—and wasflyinga conventional pattern and long, curving final approach when another fire started that blew off a large part of the left wing's leading edge and rapidly spread throughout the wing. The accident investigation showed that faulty design of the fuel filler atop the wing could, in certain flight configurations, cause raw fuel to siphon down into the wing. On this day, it was ignited by a length of test-instrument manometer tubing that touched a hot exhaust manifold and created a slowburning fuse. The B-29 became uncontrollable on final and crashed into a meatpacking plant, killing 20 on the ground as A Superfortress traiis smoke from one of its well as Allen and his 10-man crew (three engines, a not-uncommon sight in the Pacific. of whom had jumped, but too low for their chutes to open). became a squalling, tantrum-prone, 2,595Boeing's only other B-29-qualified puot, pound gorilla. who had flown as Allen's right-seater, had Wright's unlikely star engine designer was seen enough. He qtiit the program. an immigrant, Rudolph Daub, who had Still, it was the Wright engines that were grown up in the classic Germíin apprenticecreating the real headaches for Boeing and ship system that saw aspiring machinists the USAAF. Wright was trying to do—was carving camshafts out of solid bilbeing forced to do—in two years of power- lets by hand, with metal files. He plant development what typically took five. was resented at Wright, perhaps In Apru 1941, when military strategists con- because he was German, percluded that the U.S. would never win the haps because he was damn inevitable war against Japan without being good. When in the early able to seriously bomb the Home Islands, 1930s Wright decided Wright suddenly found itself tasked with to build its first buuding more than 30,000 R-3350 engines, twin-row radial, and the redheaded stepchild overnight the 14-cylin-

der R-2600, Rudy Daub's design was accepted over aU the company's other proposals. The R-2600 power plant was so good that it forced Pratt 8c Whitney to develop the classic 18-cylinder R-2800, and the R-2600 went on to power the B-25 Mitchell, A-20 Havoc, PBM Mariner and TBM/TBF Avenger. It also earned Daub the resentment of a lot of top Wright engine guys. The R-3350 was Wright's next project, and it was determined that it would be an R-2600 on steroids—nine cylinders per row rather than seven, but the very same cylinders with the very same bore and stroke. Who better to lead the project than Daub? He laid down the R-3350's basic configuration but then got transferred to the ill-fated Tornado project, which badly needed his help, and the Wright people who took over R-3350 development removed many of Daub's features. "Years later, after the troublesome debut of the R-3350," wrote aircraft engine authority Kimble McCutcheon in Torque Meter, the quarterly journal of the Aircraft Engine Historical Society, "engineers faced with the challenge of fixing the engine's many faults went back to Daub's original layouts. In every case, putting back Daub's original features solved the problem." For anybody familiar with General Motors' stultified, bloated, internally competi-

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Featuring pressurized crew compartments and remote-controi gun turrets, the B-29 was the most compiex, sophisticated bomber of Worid War II. its R-3350 radiais, however, remained probiematic throughout the war.

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tive, hierarchical 1980s corporate culture, a snapshot of Curtiss-Wright in the 1930s and '40s wül look familiar. This was a company that apparently would rather have left bombers on the ground than license engine production to a competitor. At times, CurtissWright seemed more concerned with its potential postwar competitiveness than it was with solving wartime problems. The company's several divisions had no autonomy, and Wright had a bad enough reputation in the trade that it had trouble attracting top executive and engineering talent. Wright executives "proved themselves not really up to running the company, which as part of its Curtiss-Wright parent company suddenly ballooned from an employer of a few hundred workers into a giant defense contractor with hundreds of thousands of employees in many states," wrote Jacob Vander Meulen in his revealing book Building the B-29. "Its top executives refiised or didn't know how to delegate authority and allow managers in its various divisions to use their own initiative. Everything important had to be cleared through Curtiss-Wright headquarters in the skyscrapers of Rockefeller Plaza...." In the summer of 1943, Congress—at the end if its patience with Wright—ordered General Arnold to convene a high-level committee to assess the company's problems. The board included William Brennan (a future

Supreme Court justice), Wuliam O'Dwyer (future mayor of New York) and James McDonnell (founder of McDonnell Aircraft). They found appalling managerial ineptitude and an utterly casual approach to the R-3350 project. Nor was the workforce nearly as talented as the competition's. New Jersey-based Wright Aeronautical decided to build its new R-3350 factory not far from New York City rather than, say, in Kansas, where there was a pool of aviation craftspeople with an old-school work ethic. They paid stingy wages—a starting wage of $9.40 an hour in 2011 dollars— and had to compete with New York shipyards in a region that had a high cost of living. The result was low morale, constant absenteeism, widespread slacking-off and poor worker retention. In the words of William Wolf in Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Wright used "the dregs of the workforce to manufacture the most complex piece of mass-produced machinery bunt at the time." Ultimately, the largest and best R-3350 factory was the huge one that had been buut in Chicago by Chrysler and was operated by its Dodge division. During the war, Dodge-buüt B-29 engines became the gold standard.. .for what that was worth. Much as Detroit did—to its regret—in the 1970s, Wright tried to automate the R-3350 manufacturing process as much as possible.

making its workers monitors rather than craftspeople. One of the R-3350's seemingly insoluble problems was constant, premature failures of the reduction gears that slowed B-29 propellers down to very efficient lowrpm speeds. Nobody bothered to analyze what was causing the reduction-gear failures, and Wright simply tried band-aid after bandaid. The same gearcase that would eventually successfully transmit 3,400 hp in Constellations and DC-7Cs proved unable to handle 2,200 hp for more than a few dozen hours, in some cases. Finally, somebody actually measured tolerances in a production gear set and found that an automated gang drill press at the New Jersey factory that simultaneously bored the holes for a dozen planetary-gear carrier shafts was embarrassingly out of whack. A team of experienced machinists was put to work around the clock drilling the holes, and the reduction-gear problem went away. Standard procedure for twin-row radiais of the time was to have the exhaust ports of the rear cylinders facing aft and the fronts facing forward, with the front set of short, simple exhaust pipes leading to a big collector ring ahead of the engine. Unfortunately, this meant that the very first thing cooling air encountered as it flowed into the nacelle was a red-hot exhaust manifold—not a problem with lower-power engines but a serious detri-

A B-29 burns on iwo Jima after engine trouble forced an emergency ianding in April 1945, and it crashed into a group of parked P-51Ds.

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Maintenance personnei prepare a pooi of repiacement R-3350s for B-29s of the 19th Bomb Group (Very iHeavy) on Guam in 1945.

ment to cooling airflow on a ton-and-a-quarter furnace like the R-3350. (Pratt & Whitney designed its classic R-2800 with all 18 exhaust ports facing aft, and a single big circular exhaust manifold behind the engine.) Aircraft exhaust manifolds are vulnerable to leakage, cracks and vibration failures, and when this happened on a B-29's R-3350, white-hot flames spewed back directly at the cylinder heads, resulting in valve failures and, sometimes, in catastrophic engine failure and an inevitable fire. It's not clear whether aft-facing front-row exhaust ports were part of Rudy Daub's original concept for the R-3350, but they might well have been a "needless complexity" removed by other Wright engineers, since they required artfully bent exhaust pipes to snake through the gaps between the rear cylinders. Whatever the case, redesigning the R-3350 fiont-row cylinder heads with backof-the-head exhaust ports immediately solved some cooling problems. A few of these engines were installed in late-production B-29s built in 1944 and '45. There are photos of Japan-bound B-29 formations showing airplanes here and there with broad bands of sharp-edged, solid black atop a wing, directly behind a nacelle. A big invasion stripe? Nope: ou. B-29 engines were prolific leakers, largely as a result of vibration, and routine post-mission maintenance in-

volved a lot of tightening of hose clamps, banjo fittings and compression nuts. And if an entire wing skin was wet, imagine the scene inside the nacelle. Oil fires, not fuel, often created B-29 engine blazes, though the R-3350's numerous large magnesium components fed the flames. A literally white-hot, wind-whipped magnesium fire quickly burned through a B-29's ineffectual firewall—crewmen called them "tin pans"—and then melted the aluminum wing spar close behind the nacelle. Another major cause of R-3350 fires was backfires due to poor mixture distribution, when a super-lean cylinder would burp flames back into the intake manifold. If this ignited fuel that had pooled in the poorly designed induction system, it could set alight the magnesium supercharger case. The cure for this, engineered near the war's end and later made standard for R-3350s, was direct fuel injection (DFI)—not into the intake ports upstream of the valves, as classic fuel injection works, but straight into the combustion chamber. No fuel ever enters the induction system, and DFI offers the added advantage of cylinder coolingfiromthe spray of raw gas. Today DFI is being touted as the newest and latest automotive technology, but some B-29s had it in 1945. Curtis LeMay demanded that it be fitted to the "Süverplate" B-29s of the 509th Composite Bomb Group; he had no

use for carburetors on the atomic bombers. Two B-29 gunners were positioned in clear plastic blisters amidships, on each side of the airplane. From there, they remotely controlled .50-caHber turrets through analogcomputer gunsights that calculated range, windage, target lead and even the ballistic drop of the bullets over the distance to the target. But since active gunning occupied only a small slice of time during each mission, the shooters were given a quite different primary duty: Watch the engines and report sudden oil leaks and fires. No other bomber, whether American, British or German, carried on-board fire marshals. Despite the B-29's troubled development, it's worth noting that very few changes were made to the Superfort's airframe or aerodynamics. Boeing got the bird basically right, out of the box. There were a few pressurization problems—gunner blisters occasionally blew out—but thanks to its prewar work on the Stratoliner, the company already had pressurization experience. StiU, there were enough running systems and detail changes required that at peak production Boeing decided the hell vnth it, build the airplanes as-is at the four huge factories manufacturing them, then disassemble and modify them at its Wichita facility and other modification centers. It was later called the "Battle of Kansas," and it involved thousands of techni-

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cians remanufacturing Superfortresses outdoors, during the bitter Kansas winter of early 1944, on Boeing's windswept Wichita ramp. Certainly not everything was Wright's fault. B-29s were being flown in combat by young pilots and flight engineers who often had logged just several hundred hours and had come straight from twin-engine trainers. They were making overgross takeoffs from hot, coral-dusted island runways, and their engines were being maintained by kids in flip-brimmed baseball caps working outdoors, sometimes perched on oil drums instead of workstands. It's no wonder that R-3350S were fortunate to survive for an average of 265 hours before being thrown away. (Some were overhauled, but many were simply junked, since Wright was cranking out plenty of replacements. Small mountains of trashed radiais were standard features of B-29 bases in the Pacific.) Five years later, R-3350s were thumping away for thousands of hours in Connies and DC-7s, but they were being flown by mülionmüe airline crews and maintained by professionals inside clean hangars. And they were loaded and carefully throttled up with one eye on the bottom line—airline economics. Nor were B-29s easy to fly. They had the

Cause: A flight of B-29s showers incendiary bombs over a Japanese target in July 1945.

highest wing loading of any WWII airplane; 81.1 pounds per square foot by the time the Superforts took off for Japan, lifting huge loads. The bomber was so heavy that even taxiing was a task. Turns needed to be made cautiously, to avoid rolling the tires right ofï the wheels, and the B-29's brakes were so marginal that they'd overheat if an anxious

pilot taxied a bit too fast. Maximum groundrunning time was 20 minutes, after which the engines were too hot for takeoff. The climb to altitude was painfully slow, with one eye always on the cylinder-head temperatures, and once a B-29 got established in long-range cruise, typically at an indicated airspeed of 210 mph,flyingbecame

Effect: After Japan's surrender, the Asakusa section of Tokyo shows the results of the Twentieth Air Force's B-29 bombing campaign.

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a delicate dance of slowly closing the cowl flaps to avoid too much drag yet not letting the heads get too hot. If an airplane began to faU back from its mates, a little more power was needed. But then the temps would rise. Open the cowlflapssome to compensate. But then the speed would drop even more from the added drag. Close the cowl flaps a little, but then more heat. In fact it was impossible to fly true formations in B-29s at altitude. Superforts flew in "streams" or loose groups. Look at photos of B-29s flying missions over the Pacific and you'll never see the cowl flaps fuUy closed unless the bombers are in a throttled-back descent. B-29 cowl flaps created such enormous drag that they couldn't even be fully open for takeoff; the turbulent airflow they created over the wing could cause a huge loss of lift as takeoff flaps were retracted. Postwar tests showed that fully open cowl flaps created the same effect on performance as an engine failure with the cowl flaps closed. The B-29 had a remarkably short combat career—^just 14 months—and losses of one a day, every day, during that career. Its deficiencies remained so little understood by the public only because of creative spin by Boeing and Army Air Forces publicists and the existence of a captive press corps. Even the much-admired Ernie Pyle wrote a newspaper column headlined "Pilots Adore Cramped B-29," and in it he gushed, "I've never heard pilots so unanimous in their praise of an aeroplane." It's claimed that the B-29 won the war in the Pacific, though that's only superficiaUy true. If anything, the U.S. Marines, Navy and Army won the war by capturing the islands from which B-29s could reach Japan, since earlier attempts to bomb Japan fi-om China with Superforts had proved ineffectual. But Boeing went on to ever-increasing greatness, whUe the R-3350 engine was the death of Curtiss-Wright. Though the complex radial soldiered on untu the fast-approaching end of the piston-engine era, neither Curtiss nor Wright were invited to join the U.S. Air Force and Navy in the jet age. "t" For further reading, frequent contributor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Boeing B-29 Superfortress: The Ultimate Look From Drawing Board to VJ Day, by William Wolf; Boeing B-29 Superfortress, by Steve Pace; and Building the B-29, by Jacob Vander Meulen.

Build Your Own B-29

T

he Boeing B-29 has been produced in aU the popular scales, but the most manageable kit of this huge bomber is the MiniCraft l/144thscale version (no. 14609), which fits comfortably on the average bookshelf. This is a smaU repHca with no interior flight deck, bomb bay or gunners' compartments. Start by gluing the three clear blisters into the holes in the sides and top of the fuselage pieces. The only interior piece is a "cockpit floor" that provides a base for the large greenhouse cockpit windscreen. To hide the fact there's no interior, paint the inside of the fuselage and clear parts flat black, FS-37031. Fit—but do not glue—the nose gear leg into the locating hole in one of the fuselage parts. Since this piece is very small, aUowing it to swing up into the nose will prevent it from breaking off during construction. Next cement the one-piece horizontal stabüizer into the slots in the aft fuselage. After making sure this part is perpendicular to the fuselage, close and cement the fuselage sections. Whue the fuselage is drying, assemble the wings, but don't attach the engine cowlings or props. This model is a replica of the Commemorative Air Force's restored Superfortress, the only flying example, which is preserved in a protective aluminum-colored coating. To research the various suver surface tones used on the aircraft, check the CAF's website (cafl329b24.org) and take a look at the many photographs of the B-29 in fUght and on the ground. For example, note that the forward portions of the engine cowls are definitely shiny. To reproduce this sheen, paint the edges with Floquil's bright suver. Whue the cowlings are drying, cement the wings to the fuselage. The fit here generaUy requires some fiUing and sanding, as do the fuselage seams. With basic construction complete, spray a primer coat over the model to highlight any flaws and provide a base for a coat of Floquil "old silver." Since the model wül be overaU metaUic, any seams, scratches or blemishes in the plastic wül detract from the finished product. Once the base color coat is dry, mask sec-

tions of the wings, elevators and fuselage and spray them with FloquU "platinum mist" to replicate another metal shade. The varied tones wül add interest to an otherwise monochromatic scheme. The vertical stabüizer of the CAF aircraft is marked with a big black square that has a large white "A" inside. Referencing photos from the website, mask off the box and spray it gloss black. You can also paint the fuselage stripe at the base of the vertical tau at this point. For the white "A," I used a decal taken from Super-Scale sheet no. 48-994. The B-29's cockpit and bombardier's nose glazing is molded in two pieces. After tacking them together with white glue, dryfit them to the nose. Some sanding and trimming wül be necessary to make sure this "glass" fits without gaps. When you're satisfied with the joint, paint the interior of the greenhouse flat black to avoid a seethrough effect, then cement it into place. Painting the frames of the greenhouse is tedious and wül involve considerable time masking and spraying. There are no decals or preprinted lettering available to duplicate the name Fiß emblazoned on the bomber's nose. The solution involves painting the name by hand, using Tamiya's flat blue. In some photos the Fifi lettering appears black and in others it looks dark blue. According to Don Obreiter, Fifi's executive officer in the CAF, the lettering has most recently been reproduced in dark blue. Finish up the model by painting the wheels "tire black," attaching the landing gear, painting the props gloss black and applying a set of World War Il-era stars and bars to the wings and fuselage from Micro-Scale sheet 72-13. Once you spray on a coat of gloss sealer, your Fifi is ready for the show circuit. Dick Smith

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PERFECT SOLDIER ^'Shooting genius" James McCudden owed his success in aerial combat to precision, patience and perseverance By O'Brien Browne

A

t 14,000 feet, the air above Armentieres, France, was thin and cold, but that didn't bother British Captain James McCudden on September 19, 1917. His fiill attention was focused on a black spot below, a German Rumpler twoseater he was stalking. Never taking his eyes off his target, McCudden positioned his S.F.5a fighter with the sun behind him, then banked and plunged downward, pressing his firing button as the Rumpler filled his gunsight. Just one shot explodedfi-omthe barrel of his overwing Lewis machine gun—nothing more. McCudden quickly switched to his fuselage-mounted Vickers, which spat out 30 rounds before it too jammed. Furious that his prey might escape, he was surprised to see the Rumpler's propeller stop spinning and the plane begin trailing blue smoke. McCudden cleared his Lewis and sank 10 perfectly aimed shots into the enemy aircraft. He watched as the observer slumped and the Rumpler slowly spiraled down, crashing behind the German trenches. It was classic McCudden: brilliant tactics, superb concentration, praiseworthy patience and extraordinary marksmanship. The 57victory ace was one of the most influential, well-liked and respected officers in the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force), ranking among the greatest flight commanders of World War 1. Fortunately for posterity, McCudden's recollections of war, full of typical British humor and understatement, have been preserved in his classic autobiography. Flying Fury: Five Years in fhe Royal Flying Corps.

James Thomas Byford McCudden was the son of an Irishman, born in Gillingham, Kent, on March 28,1895, into a family with a long history of military service. He attended garrison school, excelling at shooting and sports. At 15 he joined the Royal Engineers, transferring to the RFC in 1913 as an air mechanic, following the lead of his elder

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Royai Fiying Corps pilot James T.B. McCudden . S.E.5a fighter simiiar to this replica. A former mechani he continually modified each of his aircraft, installing n eguipment and repeatedly testing and aligning his guns.

brother William. One squadron commander recalled that James was "one of the best engine fitters we had, and was trusted implicitly." After war was declared in August 1914, McCudden embarked for France with No. 3 Squadron, which was equipped with French Morane-Saulnier L Parasols and assigned to reconnaissance, artillery spotting and bombing missions. He flew his first combat patrol as an observer, armed with a rifle, in November. McCudden was promoted to corporal and then sergeant in April 1915, just after he turned 20. A month later, he learned that his brother William had been killed in a flying accident. "This was a bad blow for me," he wrote, ".. .and I felt his loss very keenly indeed." As ambitious as he was hard-working, McCudden applied for puot training but was turned down. Apparently his superiors believed he was more valuable as a mechanic, though his working-class background may have also been a factor. A revolutionary new German fighter was then dominating the

skies, the Fokker E.I monoplane, equipped with a machine gun synchronized to fire through the propeller arc. In a letter to his mother, McCudden described one mission during which a Fokker "came over us like a flash, with the black crosses on his fuselage as plain as daylight. I managed to get off half a dozen rounds at him as he passed." Later, whue he was flying with his commanding officer. Major Edgar LudlowHewitt, their plane was again attacked by a Fokker, possibly piloted by German ace Max Immelmann. Determined to drive off the German, McCudden stood up in the cockpit, firing his Lewis from his shoulder. Impressed by McCudden's moxie, the CO made him a full-time observer—resulting in

McCudden iooks out from the cockpit of his S.E.5a while serving with the RFC's legendary No. 56 Sguadron.

some grumbling among squadron members. The RFC reflected the socially stratified Britain of its day: Many pilots were selected from public schools, such as Eton and Oxford, and were chosen for family connections rather than merit. The careers of working-class men like McCudden would herald immense changes that ultimately transformed both the British military and society as a whole. After McCudden received the French Croix de Guerre in January 1916 for his success as an observer, his application to become a pilot was finally approved. Promoted to flight sergeant, he returned to England to train at Gosport, soloing after just four hours of dual instruction and receiving his pilot's certificate in April. He was

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disappointed to learn that he would 1916 by introducing the Albatros be remaining in Britain for a stint as D.I. Its sleek, streamlined fuselage, 'J put TTIV oJ a flying instructor. powerful inline Mercedes engine In July he was assigned to No. 20 but TlOt and two forward-mounted SpanSquadron, flying two-seat F.E.2bs dau machine guns made it far suover the fiont A month later he got perior to any Allied aircraft. his coveted fighter assignment with McCudden vividly recalled his first shoOtm7 US 29 Squadron, which was equipped dogfight with these formidable new with the Aireo D.H.2, a rotary-powopponents: "I heard a terrific clack, ered pusher. This was "a very cold bang, crash, rip behind me, and little machine," McCudden remem- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^OUld hear htS bulktS COmiUg found a Hun was firing from about bered, "as the puot had to sit in a ten yards in the rear, and his guns small nacelle with the engine a long seemed to be firing in my very ears." way back...no warmth fi'om it at The RFC puot escaped by doing a all." During one patrol he recalled being "so intensely cold and miser- half-roU. He later counted 24 hits in his shredded plane. "It was not able that I did not trouble to look around at all to see whether any fun fighting an enemy who was 15 mues faster and had almost twice Huns were behind me or not; in fact, I did not care whether I was shot the climb," he wrote. On December 27, McCudden had another tough down or not." fight with an Albatros, this time piloted by Lieutenant Manfied von McCudden flew escort for bombers, attacked observation balloons Richthofen, who apparently claimed him as his 15th victim after and hunted for Zeppelins. On September 6, he encountered a German McCudden spun down 9,200 feet to escape the legendary German ace. two-seater over Houthem-Gheluwe, Belgium. Closing to 400 yards, "I Despite his dauy brushes with death, McCudden praised his oppoopenedfire,"he wrote. "I fired one drum of Lewis at him, and he con- nents time and again—a rare example of gallantry in what had tinued to go down whue I ehanged drums. I then got off another become a vicious, protracted war. "The German aviator," he wrote, "is drum and stul got no reply from the enemy gunner, but the German disciplined, resolute and brave, and is a foeman worthy of our best." was going down more steeply now " The vietory, his "first Hun," Despite that, he often described himself as "bloodthirsty" and clearly was eonfirmed the next day. enjoyed the thrill of the chase, saying that those who fought badly Later he had a dogfight with a Fokker that nearly cost him his life. "deserved to die." Both pilots came head-on at each other, shooting. "I now did a silly McCudden was commissioned a second lieutenant on January 1, thing," MeCudden recalled. "I put my engine off and dived, but not 1917. After eight months in combat and 115 patrols, he was sent back straight. The Fokker followed, shooting as opportunity offered, and I to Britain at the end of February, now a five-victory ace. He was could hear his bullets coming far too close to be healthy." The German awarded the Military Cross and, by June, promoted to captain. Posted managed to put just two rounds into McCudden's aircraft, but the to the Joyce Green airfield as an instructor, he taught German tactics RFC puot realized that if his opponent "had only been a Kttle skulful I and went on a lecture tour to share his combat experience with novice think he would have got me." pilots. One of his students was future ace Edward Mannock, with These "litfle incidents," as McCudden called them—bad shooting, whom he became fastfi'iends,linked by their Irish working-class roots near-fatal mistakes—"eaused me to be very furious with myself." and socialist politics. McCudden also trained his own impetuous Consequenfly he devoted much thought and training to the science of younger brother, John Anthony. aerial warfare. He spent days testing and aligning his guns and perfectAllotted a Sopwith Pup, McCudden had a Lewis machine gun ing his airplane. He beeame a sldlled, careftil flier. installed on the top wing. He used the modified fighter to target the With the Fokker now outclassed by Allied fighters such as the D.H.2 Gotha bombers and Zeppelins raiding England. Stül, he yearned to and the French Nieuport 11, the Germans countered in late August return to the front.

and dive straight.

While with No. 29 Squadron, McCudden scored his first five kills in an Aireo D.H.2—and neariy fell victim to iManfred von Richthofen.

32 AVIATION HISTORY SEPTEMBER 2011

McCudden encountered the Foiciter Eindecker, equipped with a synchronized machine gun, both as an observer and as a piiot.

Sent back to the war in July on a "refresher course," McCudden flew could identify him in the air. He flew no. B4891, marked with a "G" Pups with No. 66 Squadron. During this period, he developed the tac- (later transposed to a "6")—arguably one of the most famous British tic offlyingon lone patrols at 15,000 feet or more, hunting the enemy. fighters of WWI—from December 1917 to March 1918, scoring 32 On July 21 he was invited to participate in a mission with the elite No. victories in it within three months. In 1918, eager to reach high-flying 56 Squadron, recently equipped with new S.E.5s. After engaging in a Rumplers, McCudden reduced his plane's wing dihedral and had its dogfight with German fighters and a two-seater—and bringing down engine fitted with high-compression pistons. There was a downside: one of the former—McCudden partied with the squadron's officers. A few weeks after returning to England, McCudden was informed that he would be sent back to France as a flight commander. "I was very pleased indeed," he wrote, "as I knew, almost for a certainty, that I would go to No. 56 Squadron." McCudden joined 56 Squadron in mid-August, assigned to command B Flight, which included excellent pilots such as Lieutenants Reginald Hoidge and Arthur Rhys-Davids. The newcomer was allotted S.E.5a no. B519, the first of several of that type he would fly. Although early models of the Royal Aircraft Factory fighter had experienced engine, radiator and undercarriage troubles, McCudden wrote that he "liked the machine im- A rare aerial close-up of an Aviatik-built DFW C.V, a frequent prey for McCudden. In the mensely" and considered it "far and away course of the RFC pilot's career, he would claim six of the German reconnaissance planes. superior to the enemy" because of its top speed of 126 mph, "great strength, its diving and zooming powers, and its splendid view. Apart from this, it was a most warm, comfortable and easy machine to fly." On his first day with the squadron, McCudden skipped breakfast to align his guns and sights. "He must have fired the best part of a thousand rounds from each gun before he was satisfied," recalled one mechanic. When McCudden came into the mess for lunch, some of his comrades booed him, mistaking his professionalism for showing off. Some looked down on his working-class roots and questioned why McCudden, with "only"fivevictories, had been made a flight commander whue others were bypassed. "I'm afraid that at that time we just didn't realize Mac's worth," explained A Flight commander Major Gerald Maxwell. McCudden continually modified his S.E.5a to maximize its performance. He had a Sopwith Camel joystick installed, which he believed enabled him to fire his guns more accurately. He also shortened the exhaust pipes and later had a spinner—taken off an LVG C.V he downed— mounted to streamline the S.E.5a's stub On September 23,1917, McCudden (foreground) and Arthur P.F. Rhys-Davids try to hem in nose. This was painted red, so his men an elusive Fokker F.I triplane, in Wilson Hurley's painting The Sun Sets for Werner Voss. SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY 33

Flying at 20,000 feet reanother Albatros outmasulted in headaches, faintneuvered him, but he surness and exhaustion. vived because the German On August 18, 1917, suddenly broke off his McCudden brought down pursuit. Soon after that an Albatros D.V that had McCudden was sedately rushed at him head-on, for breakfasting with his comhis eighth kül. He bagged rades before competing in another the next day. On the squadron ping-pong the evening of the 20th, he championship. positioned himself 50 By this time McCudyards behind a D.V, firing den's score stood at 15. bursts into it from both Described by engineering guns. The German fighter officer H. Charles as "a caught fire and went down. shooting genius," the "That was my first Hun in The Rumpier C.iV, with its 21,000-foot ceiling, posed a special challenge for British ace had evolved flames," he recalled. "As McCudden, but he managed to down 15 of them, part of his 57-victory total. into an expert hunter. He soon as I saw it I thought, would staUc an enemy for 'poor devil' and reaUy felt sick " He scored a double that day. up to two hours, waiting for the perfect moment to strü
McCudden scored 32 victories in this S.E.5a, B4891, which he extensively modified. His changes included installing a Sopwith Camel control column, reducing the wing dihedral, shortening the exhaust pipes and adding a prop spinner, taken from an LVG C.V he downed.

34 AVIATION HISTORY

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gun, then went after the puot or engine. "I cannot describe the satisfaction," he mused, "which one experiences after bringing a good stalk to a successful conclusion." In December McCudden scored 14 times. On the 23rd he destroyed four enemy aircraft in one day, a first for a British pilot. He was mentioned in the official communiqué, congratulatory telegrams poured in from senior officers and his comrades honored him with a celebratory dinner. On the 28th he shot the -^ wings off a Rumpler at 16,000 feet and flamed another; pounced on an LVG at 9,000 feet, which exploded in flames; and shot up another LVG—all within 30 minutes. By early January 1918, McCudden had accounted for the squadron's 250th and B Flight's 100th victims. In the UK his picture appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail and other newspapers. He was sent on a tour, lecturing on his tactics and techniques. After another double victory on the 30th, his score reached 46. Just as he stalked the enemy, McCudden knew that death was always stalking him. He never forgot how, after one close-range engagement, his windscreen had been spattered with German blood. In late February 1918, he flew to his brother Anthony's squadron to caution him about recklessly taking chances. Credited with eight victories, Anthony was kiUed just a month later. As the war ground on, the faces of the dead likely haunted McCudden, who wrote of the dangers of becoming "too sentimental.. .one cannot afford to be so when one has to do one's job of killing and going on killing." C.G. Grey, editor of The Aeroplane, noted that McCudden "was a wonderfully deep thinker for his age," perhaps missing the point that the grim realities of war had made him so. "I realized," McCudden wrote, "that war is the most fiendish and cruel slaughter that it is possible to conceive." February was another immensely successful month for McCudden, with 11 enemy aircraft falling to his guns. One of these planes, a greentaUed Albatros D.V that sported a "K" on its top wing, was flown by Corporal Julius Kaiser, who fell or jumped to his death after it burst into flames. A blue-tailed Albatros, McCudden's second victim that day, soon followed, raising his score to 54. By the end of that month his tally stood at 57. At the beginning of March, despite his protestations, McCudden was again sent home to serve as an instructor. "I cannot say how sorry I was to leave my Squadron," he explained, "...that held many pleasant memories, and sad ones A British officer contemplates

also." His popularity had never been higher; indeed, McCudden was B Flight. Its total score stood at 123 against a mere four casualties, testimony to his outstanding leadership. The squadron gave him a farewell dinner on March 2, and that night he wrote that he "regretted that I had to leave a Ufe that was all and everything to me, and I confess I cried." The next day he was entertained by generals and his comrades threw another party, presenting him —- with a silver model of an S.E.5a. More honors awaited him in Britain, including the Victoria Cross, the UK's highest award for bravery. Remarkably, he somehow found time to write his book. Flying Fury, despite a hectic schedule. In late June, promoted to major, he was delighted to learn that he had been appointed commander of No. 60 Squadron. On the morning of July 9, McCudden bid farewell to his sister Mary in London. "I'd like you to look after these for me, sis," he said, handing her a package that contained his decorations. Later that afternoon while he was taking offfi^omAuxi-le-Château to join his new command, his S.E.5a stalled during a steep climbing turn, perhaps due to a faulty carburetor, and he crashed into a nearby wood. He was found unconscious near the wreck, suffering from head injuries. Rushed to a field hospital, 23-year-old James McCudden died that evening. He was buried at Wavans. It was an absurd death for such a perfectionist. McCudden's rich and varied career had spanned virtually the entire war. Along the way he lost two brothers and many friends. He had fought, and often conquered, Germany's best men flying their finest machines. Number 56 Squadron's Colonel Edward Galley remarked that "the perfect soldier had two qualities in equal proportions: discipline and initiative Jimmie McCudden was the nearest I have ever seen to that ideal." "It seems to me," McCudden wrote, that "the very best fellows are always those who are killed sometimes one sits and thinks, 'Oh, this damned war and its cursed tragedies.' After all, I suppose it is to be, and we cannot alter destiny." When McCudden fell. Great Britain lost one of its very best, "i"

correct way to is to down as as possible oj at the least risk, expense and casualties to one's own side. '

James McCudden's grave.

O'Brien Browne writes from Heidelberg, Germany. For further reading, he suggests McCudden's Flying Fury and also works by McCudden expert Alex Revell, including Victoria Cross: WWI Airmen and Their Aircraft; High in the Empty Blue: The History of 56 Squadron RFC/RAF 1916-1920,- and James McCudden VC.

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35

How the LUFTWAFFE Kept 'em Flying Without efficient maintenance, the vaunted German aces would never have gotten off the ground By e.G. Sweeting

T

he Messerschmitt Me-llOC-5 circled the airstrip once, came in for a smooth landing on the desert sand and taxied to what passed for a flight line, trailing a huge cloud of dust. Cutting the engines, its pilot and gunner climbed down and sheltered under the wing from the blazing sun. The pilot informed the ground crew that the Me-110's radio had quit working during his mission reconnoitering British army units in the Libyan Desert, and would require immediate attention.

two distinct lines of command: operational and administrative, the latter including maintenance and supply. As a result, flying units could train and operate virtually unencumbered by administrative and supply concerns. The administration and supply branch similarly benefited by having a well-trained group of officers and men whose practical experience was used to best advantage, and

Luftflotte was both an operational and administrative command, though both functions were exercised through a separate chain of command. This procedure was maintained down through most subordinate commands, including the Fliegerkorps (air corps), which had one to three administrative and supply Luftgau (air zones). All commands from Geschwader (wing) down to the Gruppe (group) were entirely devoted to either operations or administration and supply. A Staffel (squadron), the basic operational unit The aircraft mechanic, carrywithin the Gruppe, usually had ing his tool kit, pulled on gloves its own mobile shops for minor to prevent burning his hands on maintenance and repair. the hot metal, then opened a Operational airfield companel in the fuselage just behind mands were assigned to permathe rear gunner's position. He nent air bases to provide aircraft took a look at the radio set and maintenance, supply, billeting knew immediately what he and defense. At an established needed to do. The mechanic base, about 150 men and three could tell this at a glance because technical officers manned a the manufacturers had assembled Werft, the actual aircraft maintethe electronic equipment with nance section. Civilian engineers color-coded screws, the color Mechanics work on a Dornier Do-17Z and Junkers Ju-88A inside were also often employed by indicating whether or not the a Werft, the main maintenance section at a Luftwaffe air base. major workshops. The work perpart could be removed and disasformed was confined to major sembled in the field. It was but one small who were kept in their specialized field of repairs and other jobs that were beyond the example of how German maintenance proceexpertise. That system was one of the main capacity of squadron personnel, who handled dures saved valuable time and ensured airreasons the Luftwaffe was so successful dur- all servicing and most minor repairs. Each crews had equipment they could depend on. ing the first two years of World War II, when Werft was divided into three sections: repair, From its inception as an independent it was operating mainly from established test and supply. In a Werft of 150 men, the branch of the German armed forces on bases in the Reich. division was usually 105, 10 and 35, respecMarch 9,1935, the Luftwaffe adopted and folThe German air arm was divided into tively, including engine mechanics, metallowed a thorough plan of organization, with Luftflotten (air fleets) on a territorial basis. A smiths, structural technicians, electricians. 36

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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF C.G. SWEETING UNLESS OTHERWrSE NOTED

I; ained Schwarze e (biack lads) service [ Dornier D0-17P-1 between photorecon enrfiiis over Britain i inter of 1940. \

Ä

instrument specialists, etc. Werft personnel were typicafly equipped with proper tools and equipment and worked in well-lighted hangars and shops. The most experienced, capable men were normally assigned to the Werften in preference to the squadrons. The basic organization and segregation of operational and administrative functions gave the Luftwaffe the mobility and efficiency that proved so successful during the first stages of the war. The later superiority of the

Allied air forces can largely be attributed to operational success and superior strategy, tactics and numbers rather than to any German organizational weakness.

many often necessitated the repair and even overhaul of aircraft, engines and equipment at airfields behind the lines, frequently under adverse conditions. In the vastness of North Africa and the o one was ever awarded the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe, like the WehrKnight's Cross for greasing an macht, was frequently on the move. Ground airplane. But maintenance was a crews as well as airmen worked long hours job of great importance, made and usually lived in tents in the sun, heat and more difficult as the war progressed. The exi- dust of the desert, and the cold, snow and gencies of combat operations outside Ger- mud of Russia. Converted buses were often used as offices and mobile workshops. In addition to watching out for air attacks, ground personnel in Russia and the Balkans had to be constantly on alert to defend against attack by armed partisan bands. An incident in early July 1944 illustrates the hazardous conditions German ground personnel dealt with on the Russian Front. After the Red Army launched a major offensive against Army Group Center during the battle for Belorussia, orders were received to evacuate a forward airfield and relocate its squadron to a base farther west. Lieutenant Karl Stein had flown several ground attack missions that day, and his ground crew fueled and armed his Focke-Wulf FW-190F for one last sortie before heading west. His crew was loading their tools and equipment on trucks when the cry went up: "Russian tanks on the other side of the field!" The crew drove away in the nick of time as shells whistled overhead, whue Stein took off to bomb and strafe the advancing T-34s before heading for his new base. Under normal conditions, every Staffel had one man assigned to lubricate each plane dauy using a portable greasing machine. When possible, aircraft were also washed dauy. In the desert, where washing was usually impossible, the windscreens were cleaned before each flight and special attention was given to dust filters, lubrication and gun cleaning. Lines for oil, ñjel, hydraulic fluid and oxygen were colorcoded for ease of identification. Spark plugs were changed during every 25-hour engine check. Each Werft had a small shop for cleaning and Luftwaffe mechanics prepare to replace a 12-cylinder, liquid-cooled Junkers Jumo 211F power checking plugs before reinstallation. At plant on a Heinkel He-IIIH bomber in southern Russia during the sweltering summer of 1942. the front, of course, squadron ground 38

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N

Intelligence personnel dismantle a Messerschmitt Me-110C-5's camera in North Africa, while mechanics look over one of its engines.

crews usually performed that chore. The Germans learned a lot about aircraft operations in extremely cold weather from their experiences in Russia, Finland and northern Norway. OÜ düution was standard practice under such conditions. The Luftwaffe handbook for cold-weather operations contained easy-to-foUow düution tables for various types of engines. Squadron maintenance personnel typically changed an airplane's oil on each 25-hour engine check. Where possible, waste oil was shipped to refineries for filtering and reconditioning. Starting engines in cold weather was simplified at major air bases by internal combustion preheaters, although their use was curtaüed during the latter part of the war due to fuel shortages. Maintenance personnel sometimes employed electrical heaters, though these proved impractical because of the need for dispersal of aircraft and difficulties in providing sources of electricity. In Russia the Germans sometimes resorted to using a dan-

gerous method employed by the Soviet air force: They simply buüt a fire under the engine. The Russians often just stacked up some logs, whue the Germans usually buüt fires in old ou or fuel drums. Very little radio or radar repair was performed in the field, either by operating or service units. Squadron personnel could make minor repairs such as tube changes, but faulty units were typicaUy replaced. Mounting design, requiring the removal of just a few screws and two or three connections, helped facüitate replacement. Defective units were then returned to the manufacturer or depot for repair and reconditioning. To overcome the difficulty and time necessary for shipment of defective equipment back from forward areas, speciaUy equipped trucks served as mobue radio and radar shops. Manned by trained technicians, they were used extensively in forward areas. As might be expected, the Luftwaffe's spare parts program was weU organized and effi-

cient. There were three types of storage depots: those located in the Lufigau areas, which were completely stocked with parts; smaUer stores caUed Lufiparks; and depots on air bases with stocks based on the type of aircraft assigned there. AU repair and service facüities requisitioned parts through channels. Strict adherence to this protocol gave the Luftwaffe complete, accurate spare parts consumption records, reducing waste and simultaneously ensuring adequate stocks. There appears to have been less "scrounging" in the Luftwaffe than in the U.S. Army Air Forces.

T

he Germans carried out an extensive aircraft modification program, especially when it appeared the war was going to continue for some time. Manufacturers normally incorporated changes and improvements on the production line, but many modifications were made in thefield.Factory conversion kits with instructions were provided to the Werfien,

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY

39

Workers use a portable heater to warm the Jumo 211 engines of an He-iiiiH—an essential prelude to Eastern Front operations in winter.

where the upgrades were made whenever possible. Approximately three-quarters of the modifications were structural, and as many as 300 changes were made to some aircraft in service for years. A major modification could sometimes result in an aircraft designation change. For example, the Fw-190F-16/Ul variant resulted from a conversion kit that added wing racks for two fuel tanks or 250-küogram bombs; the Fw-190F-3/R3 modification saw two 30mm MK 103 cannons installed under the wing; and the addition of a gun camera in the left wing of an Me-109G-10 changed its designation to Me-109G-10/R5. Similar modification kits were used by the USAAF. All maintenance and repair units used standard Luftwaffe instructions, handbooks, pamphlets and forms. There were forms for routine maintenance and repair and for reporting defective or unsatisfactory materiel, and separate forms for aircraft, engines, propellers, accessories and equipment such as oxygen and armament. Publications prepared by the Air Ministry were supplemented by up-to-date pamphlets on maintaining and repairing aircraft, engines and equipment.

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One aspect of German maintenance that stood out above all others to ensure efficient work in the field was the control and direction of design. Whenever possible, new equipment was designed to utilize parts already in service. This was particularly true with standard fittings, hoses, studs, gaskets, nuts, bolts, rivets, etc.—in fact, with all standard maintenance supplies—but the effort extended beyond small parts. New engines used the same accessories as engines already in service, unless the accessory was totally inadequate, and accessories were often interchangeable among engines produced by different manufacturers. Accessibility and ease of inspection and adjustment were also considered. Part numbers were standardized, with different manufacturers using identical numbers for the same parts. In general, the policy on equipment requiring highly specialized maintenance was to change out whole units. If equipment was to undergo only limited maintenance and repair work in the field, the manufacturers allowed for easy removal and installation. In addition to using color-coded screws in electronic equipment, manufacturers attached

sealed safety wires to complex components on engines and equipment not intended to be serviced or repaired in the field. Performance was occasionally sacrificed to some extent to simplify upkeep. By using a limited number of standard tubes in radio equipment, for instance, the Germans simplified supply and repair problems, even though it meant a reduction in operating efticiency. The Germans had an excellent training program for ground personnel. Whenever possible, field assignments took advantage of trainees' civilian experience and education. At the beginning of the war, the training course for aircraft mechanics lasted 12 months and covered work on a number of operational aircraft and engines. The course included theoretical instruction, and after an examination the student began training in two-month intervals on engines and troubleshooting. Trainees worked in an engine factory, an airframe factory and an accessory or propeller plant. Then it was back to the school, followed by an exam. Men who faued the course at any stage were assigned to an aircraft service unit rather than a repair unit. The course was shortened to six months dur-

¡ng the war, but the caliber of maintenance personnel generally remained high. As in other air forces, some German pilots and aircrews developed close personal relationships with their ground crews, on whom their lives depended. Günther Rail, who ended the war with 275 victories, often spoke of his high regard for his personal mechanic. In April 1944, they sheltered in a cave near an airstrip west of Sevastopol. The Soviets were on the verge of recapturing the city, and when orders were received for his squadron to evacuate. Rail was determined not leave his loyal mechanic behind to face capture. Somehow he managed to squeeze him in behind the puot seat of his Me-109G, and together they flew across the Black Sea to safety at a German airfield in Romania.

I

n summary, there were three major advantages to the German aircraft maintenance program. First, its sound organizational structure, which separated operational functions from administrative and supply functions, permitting each to carry out its mission unencumbered by unnecessary details. Second, the thorough and practical training given to maintenance personnel. Third, the constant effort on the part of designers and manufacturers to incorporate features that simplified and sped up repair and replacement in the field. There were a few drawbacks to the German methods. The Luftwaffe relied mainly on civilian contractors for overhauls. Air forces should have a maintenance and repair organization capable of every type of repair or overhaul function. There was no direct liaison between the German Air Ministry and operational units, and communication was entirely by mail or report, resulting in a lack of coordination and loss of time in handling difficulties that arose. Luftwaffe aircrews fought valiantly for their country, and earned an enviable reputation in the annals of air combat. But their accomplishments would have been impossible without sound maintenance methods and the men who put them into practice. "Í" e.G. Sweeting is a U.S. Air Force veteran and former curator at the National Air and Space Museum. While there are no specific references on German wartime aircraft maintenance, to read about U.S. practices see the 1944 book AAF:

The Official Guide to the Army Air Forces.

MaintenaUR U.S. vs. Them

I

n the U.S. Army Air Forces, overall maintenance and repair was the responsibility of the Air Service Command. USAAF maintenance was divided into four echelons, not unlike the Luftwaffe system, ranging from minor repairs done by ground crews to work by service squadrons and complete overhauls by an air depot. General maintenance in the Luftwaffe was performed in compliance with technical orders similar to those used by the USAAF and U.S. Navy. But as the war progressed and Germans operated over greater distances and under adverse conditions, ground crews often resorted to improvisation and substitution. The following information was obtained mainly through interrogation of Luftwaffe maintenance personnel by Allied intelligence teams during and after the war: 1 . Structural maintenance checks were carried out on landplanes every 300 hours. Seaplanes were inspected every 100 hours until 1943, then every 200 hours thereafter. In the USAAF, this would have been firstor second-echelon maintenance. 2 . Engines were inspected and checked every 25 hours. A complete check was done every 150 hours, when all accessories were removed, inspected and reinstalled. In the USAAF, inspections were made 25 hours after an engine change, and after 50 and 100 hours of flight. 3 . Propellers were usually checked every 12 hours (on every engine check and once in between). 4 . Engines were overhauled every 450 hours (normally 500 hours in the USAAF). Civilian contractors performed the majority of overhauls, with Luftwaffe shops at permanent airfields doing about 15 percent. During the campaigns in Russia and North Africa, when hangars, barracks and other facilities were destroyed by air attacks and subsequent ground battles, over-

A USAAF crew performs maintenance on a Bell P-39 in the Aleutian Islands.

hatds were often done in the field imder challenging conditions. Where possible, overhauled engines were checked on engine test stands, some mounted on trucks for use in the field. Quick-change stands were used at depots and sometimes at Werften. The quality of overhauled German engines deteriorated during the war due to combat conditions and a shortage of qualified personnel, equipment and parts on the front lines. This was almost , never a problem in the USAAF. j 5 . The standard overhaul period for aircraft was originally 600 hours, but that standard was not always adhered to later in the war. An airplane was partially disassembled after 600 hours, and if visual inspection indicated it was in good condition, it was reassembled and flown an additional 300 hours before overhaul, Private companies performed major overhauls on a contract basis, though the Werften also did some. This was third- or fourth-echelon maintenance at USAAF bases or depots.

j ! ! i

6 . Overhaul of major components was originally done by many different companies, with final assembly taking place at the facility that overhauled the fuselage. Many overhauled parts were sent to aircraft manufacturing plants for incorporation into new aircraft. Although this practice would seem to have obvious disadvantages, officers could not recall an instance when it resulted in a structural failure. In the later years of the war, parts shortages resulted in the cannibalizing of wrecked aircraft and reusing damaged parts. C.G.S.

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DEADLY

SABRE DANCE How film footage of a spectacular crash saved lives and spawned a legend By Alan Cockrell

W

hen you're preflighting an airplane that has just rolled out of the factory, you expect it to be perfect. But every puot knows that perfection is elusive in aviation, and simple mistakes can snowball into disastrous mishaps within seconds. First Lieutenant Barty R. Brooks found that out the hard way on January 10,1956.

That afternoon Brooks and two other U.S. Air Force pilots reported to North American Aviation Corporation's Pakndale, Galif, factory and signed acceptance papers for three shiny new F-IOOG Super Sabres. The three men, members of the 1708th Ferrying Wing, Detachment 12, based at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, would be flying the "Huns" to their new duty station at George Air Force Base, barely a 10-minute hop to the southeast, at Victorvüle. For the ferry pilots, who routinely trained to deliver new planes across oceans, the day's assignment must have seemed like a walk in the park. Brooks walked around the jet, checking for the usual signs of trouble: leaking fluids, unlatched fasteners, underinflated tires and the luce. Since he was new to the F-lOO, Uke most puots in 1956, he may not have known that when ground crews towed the plane they disconnected the torque link fi-om the nose gear scissors by removing the pivot pin, which had to be reinserted and secured

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before flight. Brooks didn't notice the pin wasn't secure. Completing his inspection, he mounted up with the others. AH three pilots started their engines, and the leader. Captain Rusty Wüson, checked the night in on the radio. The third puot in the group was Lieutenant Crawford Shockley. They took off at 1512 hours, undoubtedly expecting to make happy hour at the George oifieer's club. THE MAKING OF A JET PILOT Brooks was born into a farming family in Martha, Okla., in 1929. His famüy later moved to Lewisvüle, Texas, northwest of Dallas. Bart studied at Texas A&M, where he joined the Cadet Corps. At 6-feet-3, Brooks towered over most lowerelassmen, to whom he became public F-84s and North American F-86s. known as "Black Bart." Although he arrived in Korea too late to see By the time Brooks graduated in 1952 with combat. Brooks gained a profound sympathy an agriculture degree,flyinghad captured his for the Korean people in the aftermath of the fancy. After collecting his ROTC commission, fighting. He joined an organization that cared he headed to Columbus, Miss., for basic flight for Korean orphans, supporting a girl and training. John Wilson, Bart's friend and class- three boys. mate at Columbus, reflected that because of After Korea, Brooks was assigned to the his training at Texas A&M, Bart was a model 1708th as a ferry pilot. The idea was to get officer: "He wore the uniform well. He was the planes fi-om factories to bases without well liked and represented the Air Force as interrupting the training routines of operawell as any officer. He was just a super person." tional units, just as the WASPs had during Brooks went on to Laredo, Texas, for jet World War II. Former ferry puot Joe Hülner training, then reported to the 311th Fighter- recalled that Bart Brooks was one of about Bomber Wing in Korea, where he flew Re- 100 puots in the outfit. "We were required to

maintain currency in at least two jet fighters," he said, "and as many [propeUer] planes (such as the F-51, L-20, T-6, B-25, B-26, etc.) as we wanted." Brooks went to NeUis Air Force Base in Nevada for his F-lOO checkout. The ferry pilots were given a short course because they had been previously qualified as missionready in older fighters. So when Brooks took off from Palmdale that fateful day in January 1956, he had only logged a bit more than 40 hours in the Super Sabre. Brooks had already had one brief brush with fame. Whue he was stul in gunnery school at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, he

was one of three trainees featured in an article in The New York Times Magazine's May 2, 1954, issue, "The Making of a Jet Pilot." Describing Brooks as "very tall and blond," author C.B. Palmer added: "His height and spareness give an impression of awkwardness. His physical movements are slow but they cover the ground. He is rough-cut in appearance, very open and simple in his responses to questions." Following the trainees through a day of briefings, gunnery practice, academics and time off. Palmer described them all as "acceptable men and the only concern here is to make them the best possible."

EMERGENCY DIVERSION TO EDWARDS The flight of three Super Sabres roared over George Air Force Base late that afternoon, sequentially breaking to the downwind leg. Then all three slowed and lowered their gear—and that's when the trouble started. One of Brooks'flightmates noticed that his F-lOO's nose wheel scissors was disconnected. The unsecured pivot pin had worked loose and fallen out, causing the scissors assembly to fall open and allowing the nose wheel to swivel at random. Fearing his aircraft might swerve off the runway on touchdown. Brooks powered up and went around. He decided to

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First Lieutenant Barty Brooks attempts to fly out of an impending stall using his afterburner (above). Moments iater his F-100C rolls right (center) and explodes on impact.

divert to nearby Edwards Air Force Base, home to the USAF FUght Test Center. Fighter puots never allow one of their own toflyalone if he is in trouble. Wüson escorted Brooks to Edwards, whose 15,000-foot runway provided a wide safety margin and whose fire and rescue crews were accustomed to emergencies. Brooks' decision to go to Edwards set the stage for arguably the most famous film footage in aviation history.

gine, more wing sweep (45 degrees versus 35 degrees in the E-86) and a new device that generated powerful pulses of thrust at the touch of the püot's throttle hand—an afterburner. Early models, the A and C (there was no B), had no traüing edge fiaps, which meant their approach speeds were much higher than with previous jets. Hun puots had to think

Edwards was then in its heyday. Its cadre of test puots frequently vied to best each other, routinely breaking speed and altitude records, whue engineers worked to analyze the data gathered from their efforts. As the afternoon of January 10 was winding down, the base's film crew was gearing up for yet another test, with camera operators readying their equipment. Suddenlyfirefightingequipment roared toward the runway, and the cameramen spotted an E-lOO coming around the final turn on approach. The crews switched on their equipment and swung their viewfinders toward the incoming jet. BEHÍND THE POWER CURVE Brooks' experience in Korean War-era jets hadn't fuUy prepared him for the new generation of fighters, particularly the dicey F-100. The Hun was the result of North American Aviation's quest to improve on its success with the F-86 Sabre, which estabUshed a 10to-1 kül ratio in Korea. Eirst produced in 1953, the F-lOO was bigger than the F-86 and capable of supersonic night, with a meatier en-

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Brooks poses on the wing of an F-86 Sabre, the "Hun's" predecessor, in 1953.

faster and farther ahead. And because of its highly swept wings, the new fighter had vicious staUing characteristics. At low speeds, the tips stalled first, with the stall progressing inboard. This not only rendered the aüerons less effective but also shifted the center of Uft forward of the center of gravity, resulting in a tendency to pitch up—which in turn aggravated the stall. The Hun had other insidious tendencies. As Curtis Burns, one of Brooks' friends, pointed out, "The F-IOOC had.. .a dangerous tendency to [develop] adverse yaw and roUcoupling at a high angle of attack." These are complex aerodynamic and inertia forces that interact with each other. A roU at slow speed and a high angle of attack can produce unwanted pitch or yaw. The F-lOO was notorious for this. Jack Doub, a veteran of the legendary Misty F-lOO squadron in Vietnam, put it succinctly: "Most of us quickly learned to deal with low-and-slow issues—we avoided them!" But Barty Brooks had not yet learned the F-lOO's quirky ways. At 1627 hours Pacific time he rounded the final turn and saw that his descent rate would put him on Edwards' runway prior to reaching the area the fire trucks had covered with foam. He raised his nose to stretch his approach toward the foam, but he was late adding more power. His airspeed fell. His wingtips began to staU. The wings rocked. Adverse yaw coupled in, and the nose swayed left and right as Brooks applied aüeron pressure to stop the

rolling motion. As his airspeed dropped, the oscillations worsened and the nose pitched higher because the center of lift was moving forward. Realizing he was seriously behind the power curve—the "region of reverse command," where more power is required to sustain flight at lower airspeeds—Brooks lit his afterburner. THE DANCE Footage from the base's cameras clearly shows a blue plume blasting dirt from the runway and adjacent desert. The raw power of the F-lOOC's afterburner blast, coupled with the pitch-up of the creeping stall, raised the Hun's nose even higher, untu it was nearly vertical. Brooks, however, was by that time too low and slow to be able to safely eject. Unlike modern "zero-zero" ejection seats, the seats of his era had to be used at a minimum airspeed and altitude in order for an ejection to be survivable. The film shows that Brooks twice lowered the nose to lessen his angle of attack and try to fly out of the impending stall. But each time the nose pitched up again, and each time the burner blasted a fresh spray of dirt from the ground. Moving in a slow, eerie fashion, the Hun waltzed down the runway, then over its perimeter, snout jutting skyward, swaying almost gracefully from side to side. The nearby rescue vehicles gunned their engines to get out of the jet's path. As Brooks struggled with the pitch oscula-

PATCH COURTESY OF MICHAEL 0. BROWN

tions, the Hun roUed right, then hesitated and rolled steeper to the right. His heading swerved 90 degrees from the runway. The bank angle steepened to close to 90 degrees, and the fighter fell into the ground on its right wingtip. An enormous explosion erupted, spewing out a ball of upward-boiling, pitch-black smoke laced with ribbons of flame. Debris rose, fell and tumbled in all directions. The fire and rescue teams arrived within mere seconds, quickly reducing the inferno to a few isolated fires. They reached Brooks in less than two minutes, but found him dead, stul strapped in his seat, which had

The shouider patch of the 1708th Ferrying Wing, with which Brooks served in 1956.

torn loose from its mounts and roUed free of the wreckage. Stories have long circulated that Brooks survived the crash only to die of asphyxiation, having suffocated from his own vomit. Not true. His helmet and oxygen mask were not on his head when rescuers found him. Both were found in the wreckage. The investigating officer concluded that Brooks had been at fault: He had failed to adhere to the landing techniques outlined in the pilot's flight handbook. Contributing factors were the loose pivot pin and the fact that Brooks had been distracted by "too much emphasis on trying to hit the foam." Brooks' friends and others close to the accident agreed that if he had continued his rate of descent and landed short of the foam, instead of trying to stretch his approach, the outcome would have been far different. In later discussions, several puots who talked with North American engineers indicated that Brooks' nose wheel would likely have aligned itself on touchdown. The film of the accident was soon circulated among Air Force and Navy units for safety training purposes. Bart's fatal ride was quickly tagged the "Sabre dance." ENCORE PERFORMANCES There were many other accounts of similar incidents. Pilot Sam Mclntyre, for example, wrote: "In 1961 at Nellis AFBI saw an F-IOOD do the Sabre Dance. On the take off [his] nose pitched straight up and that's when the SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION RISTOBV

45

NOSE GEAR TORQUE LINK

TOBQUE LIHK SHOWN DISCONNECTED FOR TOWING

Figuri; i.36 wmcíi din-cLs utiliLy hydraulic pressure to tlie nose wheel steering unit. A clutch is then engaged hydrauhc-ally lu link the rudder pedal cables with the steiring nnií.

After the .«iy.slcm is L'n^gctl, it fcmalns engaged utitií the button h depressed and T&le.Aaed a si:i:c)iid Liiiic. NOTE

; CAUTION If nidder pedals are n(iL aL nL'uLrul when button is pressed, the steering mnyormny itui L-iixuKC (depending on eiigagement ot clutch in Htecring unit) and muvL- ÜIL' iiusc wlieeli to agree with the ped.il poiitinn. If tlic atcL'jiiiji docs not ^n^age. the pedals miixt hp movRil in (he ihrecLitm of [he nose wheel setting tu obtain stecrinf,.

Tlie nose wheel stpp-nng biiiltm is upciuble oidy if piimary bus power is .ivaflahie anil thei wp.i^i lifihc airplane is on the nose gear.

WHEEL BRAKE SYSTEM. TliL- mulliple-dislc type hydraulic-ally nperaled brakes ore on the iniiboard xidc of the uiain wheels. The hraking action on each wheel u indepEndcnlly i:uiiliolled by the reapixlivc luddei pedal. Toe action on the rudder pudals

For want of a safety pin: Failure to heed the caution note regarding the nose gear torque link in the F-100 "Dash 1" manual contributed to the accident that cost Brooks' life.

dance began....the right wing dropped and touched the ground, the nose dropped just enough for the pilot to gain some control. He flew it out of the stall, just a few feet above our heads and over the tails of other F-lOOs...." The puot who survived that episode flew on to the gunnery range, apparently undaunted, but the incident so unnerved Mclntyre's flight that the men aborted their mission. Curtis Burns, a classmate of Bart's at A&M, had a hard time watching the ñkn, but he realized that there were valuable lessons to be learned from it. "Our squadron was shown film cHps of his crash and it was obvious...what mistakes he made," Burns said. "I have seen several pilots die in fiery crashes when they made mistakes in handling the F-100." Ron Green was one of the pilots who learned from Brooks' mistakes. "Prior to our first solo fiight in a ' C model," he said, "we watched the film of the Sabre Dance.... After watching this I said to myself, if [Brooks] had only applied fuU [power] and full opposite rudder, and slammed the stick forward when the nose rose and it started to roU, he would have survived." The next day Green mounted up for his initial solo. Approaching to land, he recalled, "Everything was going good... .Then at round-out I must [have].. .puUed back on the stick [too much]." The Super Sabre's nose jumped up so high that Green couldn't see out front. He applied full power, kicked fuü rudder opposite the roU and pushed the stick forward. The jet rolled upright and the nose went down. He hit the runway in a threepoint attitude, bounced back into the air and

F-IOOs of the 479th Fighter Day Wing await their next mission at George Air Force Base in California.

46

AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

slowly accelerated. "It [the Brooks film] saved my life!" he said. Medley Gatewood got a colossal scare when he was a new instructor, flying in the back seat of a tandem cockpit F-IOOF, with a student in front. Whue trying to land, the student raised the nose too high, and the right wing dropped. The student countered with left aüeron but didn't apply rudder. The nose yawed violently right. "At that point," Gatewood said, "time and motion seemed suspended, and...the famous Sabre dance film flickered tlirough my thoughts." Gatewood took over, applied left rudder, lowered the nose and went to müitary power (maximum power without afterburner). Remembering how Brooks' use of the afterburner seemed to aggravate the nose-high attitude, he stopped short of engaging it. The Hun bounced out of a three-point landing and slowly climbed out. Gatewood was "shaking like a quaking Aspen tree" when a wingman joined up and informed him that the fairings on both his wingtips were bent upward from hitting the ground. As they came back around the pattern, the student asked to resume control before the landing, but Gatewood refused, using a few very choice words. Incredibly, at least one puot intentionally waltzed with the Super Sabre—in fiont of thousands of awed spectators. In an online forum, BÜ1 Turner recalled a memorable airshow he saw in North Carolina in the late 1950s: "Bob Hoover did a 'Sabre Dance' with an F-100.1 have never seen anything like it. It seemed to stop in space in front of us and twist and turn like a bird catching a bug. Great plane, greater puot." Few would argue with him. As the years passed, the story of Brooks' last ride was told countless times in bars and hangars. Inevitably it was also mentioned in a verse of the renowned fighter puot song "Give Me Operations":

Waltiing Into Hollywood

T

he first filmmakers to capitalize on 1st Lt. Barty Brooks' ill fortune were the producers of the 1958 feature film The Hunters. Robert Mitchum, starring as Major Cleve SaviUe, and John Gabriel, as the annoying, undisciplined Lieutenant Corona, send numerous MiGs plunging from the sky, until onefinallygets Corona. He makes it back to base but cracks up whue trying to land. The landing scene is the footage of Brooks meeting his fate at Edwards—never mind that Corona's F-86 has magically morphed into an F-100. Three years later, the Sabre dance footage was used again, this time in a way that was much more in keeping with the actual mishap. In the movie X-15, Charles Bronson, playing Lt. Col. Lee Brandon, pilots an F-100 in chase during an X-15 test flight from Edwards. The X-15 puot, played by David McLean, lands safely, but Brandon's Super Sabre develops a problem. Instead of ejecting, Brandon tries to save the bird; the

footage in ground school, watching aghast as Bart waltzed toward his death. In a very different context, many more people would also get to see the Sabre dance: tens of thousands of moviegoers and TV watchers. The dramatic crash footage was incorporated into a handful of major films and television series (see sidebar, above).

SEPARATING THE MAN FROM THE LEGEND Looking back now, it might seem insensitive to use footage of a müitary man's death in such a manner. Air Force officials never told Brooks' parents, both now deceased, about the film. In fact his niece, Kaelan Anderson, only recently learned of the film's existence when I asked her about it. She said: "I do not want to view these movies [and] I object that Don't give me a One-Double-Oh they used the füm to make money. I wül To fight against friendly or foe always cherish the memories of my Uncle That old Sabre Dance made me Bart. He was a special man, and he was loved crap in my pants by all his family and friends." Don't give me a One-Double-Oh Former Super Sabre pilot John Wilson The film of Brooks' accident undoubtedly agreed, saying, "I have big problems when I saved lives after he died. Generations of fledg- have seen it in the commercial movies." Wüling Air Force and Navy puots—^the author son, who was supposed to be püoting the included—were shown the legendary film plane that Brooks flew that day, explained: "I

A stricken F-86 suddenly morphed into Brooks' doomed Hun in The Hunters.

results are the images of Brooks riding his Hun into eternity. Bart's famous ride also cropped up on TV, appearing in the next-to-last episode of Steve Canyon, aired in 1959, which was dedicated to the personnel of George Air Force Base. Most recently, the footage made an appearance in the late 1990s, in the TV series Pensacola: Wings of Cold. A.C. had planned to go back to New York for the Christmas holidays. When Bart heard that my leave had been canceled and that I had been assigned to fly that mission, he stepped up and said, 'I've been home reeently. You go on leave and I'U take the flight for you.' So as you can see I'm somewhat emotional about the accident.... I loved the guy. He did me a big favor, and it killed him." Lieutenant Barty R. Brooks lies in Round Grove Cemetery in Lewisviüe, Texas. But his legendary Sabre dance will live on, as long as there are pilots left who remember the film of his tragic accident. Anytime they wateh it, or replay those ghastly images in their memory, they'll be silently admonishing Bart to lower his nose and push that damned rudder. ~t Alan Cockrell is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel currently serving as a Boeing 757/767 captain for United Airlines. Further reading: Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Puots and the Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trau, by Rick Newman and Don Shepperd; and F-100 Super Sabre at War, by Thomas E. Cardner. To watch the official USAF "Sabre Dance"filmfootage, visit historynet.com/aviation-history. Also see supersabresociety. com.

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY

47

THE ROOF OF THE

ORLD

The 1933 Houston-Westland flight over Mount Everest took British imperial derring-do to new heights By Derek O'Connor I years before hdmuiid Hillary and Teiizing Norgay ne the first men to set fool on the 29,029-foot summit |f Mount Everest on May 29,1933, intrepid British aviators had looked down on its untrodden snows from two singlebiplanes. Tbe Everest flight was the brainchild of Colonel itewart Blacker, an air-minded regular army officer who had earned a

civilian flying license in 1911. Blacker submitted his expedition plans to the Royal Geographical Society in March 1932, emphasizing that, apart from scoring a notable "first" for Britain if the attetnpt was successful, the expedition had a serious scientific purpose: photo-surveying and mapping a large area of the Himalayas. Squadron Leader Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Marquess of

Douglas and Clydesdale and commanding officer of No. 602 Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was selected to püot the lead airplane, with Flight Lt. David Mclntyre, his squadron deputy,flyingthe second aircraft. Both planes would carry observer-photographers, with Blacker sei"ving as senior observer. Air Commodore P.E.M. Fellowes was appointed expedition leader and support püot. The RAF in India agreed to supply a resen'c pilot and provide logistical support to the expedition. Lord Clydesdale overcame problems with funding the project during the lean days of the Depression by securing the financial backing of Lady Lucy Houston, the wealthy and intensely patriotic former showgirl who had sponsored the RAE's victorious 1931 Schneider Trophy team. Gaumont British Picture Corporation would film the expedition, and The Times acquired newspaper and photographic rights. Meanwhile expedition planners had to obtain permission from. the king of Nepal to fly across his territory to Tverest. The airplanes selected for the attempt were the expeiiniental Westland P.V.3, soon renamed the "Houston-Westland," and a virtu-

ally identical Westland P.V.6 Wallace GPA (müitary general purpose! aircraft). Both rugged biplanes had a comparatively large wing area, with high aspect ratio. Powered by 630-hp supercharged Bristol Pegasus S3 engines, they had a ceüing of about 34,000 feet at a time when the world altitude record for fixed-wing aircraft was less than 44,000 feet. Eor this flight the observers* open cockpits would be covered with hinged panels. Next the planners had to lackle the critical problems of supplying the airmen with oxygen and keeping them warm above 30,000 feet. With weight a cruciiü factor, it was fortunate that Vickers Armstrong was able to supply lightweight oxygen cylinders made from a new type of alloy steel. Thc rtiovie and stiU cameras were another heavy addition to the carg0, with each film spool alone weighing AVi pounds. For protegen against the extreme cold, the airmen were outfitted with cunjbersome double-layered, electrically heated flying suits, as well as heated gloves and goggles. The tiny aperture in each airman's oxygen regulating valve, which was susceptible to blocking by particles of ice or small insects, represented a worrisome vulnerabüity.

The Houston-Westla,nd, crewed by Squadron Leader Douglas Douqlas-Hamilton and Colonel Stewart Blacker, was photoqraphed near Mount Everest's peak by ^.R. Bonnett in a Westland P.V.6 Wallace on April 19,1933. kKG-lMAGE5/ULLSTEIN BILD

In February 1933, the crated Wesdands were shipped to Karachi (then in imperial British India) to be reassembled by the RAF. Meanwhile a de Havilland Fox Moth piloted by FeUowes, a Gipsy Moth flown by Clydesdale and a Puss Moth with Mclntyre at the controls left England together on an adventurous Odyssey that took them by stages across Europe and the Middle East to Karachi. Fellowes was accompanied by his wife, Clydesdale by Times journalist E.C. Shepherd and Mclntyre by mechanic C.H. Hughes. The Moths were to be the expedition's maids of all work, including vital weather reconnaissance flights. By late March, the expedition was established at Lalbalu airfield, Purnia, in the northern Indian state of Bihar, about 50 mues south of Everest, ready and waiting for a favorable weather report. The forecast for Apru 3 was for winds of 67 mph at 28,000 feet, well above the prescribed limit of 40 mph. But after FeUowes made an early morning flight in one of the Moths and established that Everest was free of clouds, they decided to send off the Westlands. Clydesdale piloted the Houston-Westland, with Blacker as observer-photographer, while Mclntyre and Gaumont cameraman S.R. Bonnett crewed the Wallace. Shortly after takeoff they encountered a heavy dust haze rising to a great height that completely obscured the ground leading up to the higher mountain ranges. Some 30 minutes later at 30,000 feet, battling fearsome headwinds, they gained their first sight of Everest, although it proved impossible to identify landmarks until they were about 20 mues from the summit. Closing on Everest at 31,000 feet, they realized that the wind had driven them off course and they were approaching the mountain from the leeward side. Clydesdale later recalled: "We were in a tremendous down-rush of air. Though the machine continued to climb, it was climbing in an air current that was carrying it down at a much greater velocity... .The great buUc of Everest was towering above

With the reassembled Wallace in the foreground, the expedition receives a royal welcome from local nobles on elephants in India.

us... .There was nothing we could do but climb straight ahead and hope to clear the lowest point in the barrier range... .With the aircraft heading virtually straight into the wind, we crabbed sideways towards the ridge, unable to determine if we were level with it or below." In the rear cockpit. Blacker had a different though no less alarming perspective: "The crest came up to meet me as I crouched peering through the floor and I almost wondered whether the tail-skid would strike the summit.. .and indeed before I expected it we swooped over the summit... .The puot swung the machine again skilfully towards 50 AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

RAF mechanics in Karachi work to reassemble the Westland Wallace after the expedition's airplanes arrived, crated, in India.

the westward into the huge wind force sweeping downwards over the crest—We were now for a few moments in the very plume itself and, as we swung round, fragments of ice rattled violently into the cockpit. We made another circuit and then another as I exposed dozens of plates—We could not wait long over the mountain for the oxygen pressure gauge in my cockpit was moving downwards, an ominous sign." Not long after, they turned for home. Mclntyre and Bonnett, in the Wallace, had encountered similar problems, estimating that if they cleared the ridge it would only be by the narrowest of margins. But then, "A fortunate up-current carried us up by a few feet and we scraped over." In aU the excitement, Bonnett trod on his oxygen pipe, damaging it. He just managed to tie a handkerchief around the split before he collapsed unconscious on the cockpit floor. Mclntyre could do nothing to help; it was only when nearing Lalbalu at about 8,000 feet that, to his relief, he saw Bonnett "struggling up from the floor tearing off his mask and headgear. He was a nasty green shade but obviously alive." At Lalbalu, rejoicing over their successful flight soon turned to disappointment when it became clear that Bonnett had been unable to operate his cameras for half the flight. In addition, the team later found that the photos from both aircraft were of unacceptable quality due to the dust haze surrounding the mountains. Obviously a second flight would be necessary. Before that, however, they decided to make a test flight to check all the equipment. This took place the next day over Mount Kanchenjunga, 90 mues east of Everest. The RAF reserve puot. Flying Officer R.C.W. EUison, and Bonnett manned the Houston-Westland, while FeUowes and cinematographer A.L. Fisher crewed the Wallace. Flying into extreme turbulence over the peaks, the two planes became separated. Fellowes recalled that it felt as though the Wallace were "a rat being shaken vigorously by an expert terrier," while Bonnett in the observer's cockpit of the Houston-Wesdand remembered a bump of such magnitude that he was certain they would be "smashed to pieces." Then Fellowes experienced oxygen starvation. Losing his bearings, he eventually made a high-altitude forced landing near Shampur railway station, well short of Lalbalu. He and Fisher had great difficulty in

preventing a crowd of excited locals, who had never seen an airplane before, from running into the propeller. After returning to base the next day, the expedition leader took to his bed with a fever. The near disasters of the Kanchenjunga flight alarmed expedition backers, who had enthusiastically congratulated the team on the success of the first Everest flight. A concerned Lady Houston even sent Clydesdale a cautionary telegram advising, "Do not tempt the evil spirits of the mountain to bring disaster." Moreover, having fulfilled its obligations by covering two Himalayan flights, their insurance company refused to cover a third attempt unless a large additional premium was paid. Ignoring those concerns and acutely conscious that the scientific objectives of the expedition had not yet been fully achieved, Clydesdale and Blacker in the Houston-Westland and Mclntyre and Bonnett in the Wallace decided to press ahead with another Everest Douglas-Hamilton and Blacker pose in the Houston-Westiand flight—without telling the ailing Fellowes, in case he banned it due to at Lalbalu before setting out to conguer the heights of Everest. insurance concerns. They had sufficient oxygen for just one more ing oblique photographs of those unexplored declivities, ridges and Himalayan flight. The two Westlands took off from Lalbalu early on April 19, flying ranges... .1 alternated between diving down to the survey camera to into a tremendous headwind. Blacker wrote: "On we went up to help it do its appointed task and leaning over the side of tlie open cock31,000 feet, the mountain getting ever closer and I started busily tak- pit to take obliques." Having reached the apex of their course about 31/2 mues from Everest, Clydesdale turned south to return to base. Mchityre meanwhile continued battling the headwind. The puot I thought he and Bonnett still had something to prove after the observer's oxygen problems on the first flight had prevented them from completing their photographic assignment. Mclntyre recalled: "The next fifteen minutes was a grim struggle. The altimeter showed 34,000 feet. The menacing peak with its enormous plume whirling and streaking away to the South-East at 120 mues per hour appeared to be almost underneath us but refused to get right beneath. After an interminable time, it disappeared below the nose of the aircraft... .We appeared to be stationary... .Then suddenly there was a terrific bump—just as one might receive flying over an explosives factory when it blew up. It felt as if the wings should break off at the roots... .The bump was a relief in a way, as it indicated the summit and was the signal for a careful gentle turn to the right to settle down on our predetermined compass course for home." Fortunately, the wings remained intact, and both Westlands and their exhausted crews returned safely without further incident. The flight had been an unqualified success. They had brought back nearperfect aerial photographs for the first detailed scientific survey of the Himalayan region. Although Fellowes was predictably livid at what The Times described as "a piece of magnificent insubordination," he calmed down when congratulatory telegrams started arriving from, among others, the chief of the air staff. Sir John Salmond. As an example of British imperial derring-do, their achievement could scarcely have been bettered. Clydesdale and Mclntyre later received the Air Force Cross, "t"

à

An assistant adjusts the oxygen mask during a test in England of one of the airmen's electrically heated high-altitude flying suits.

Frequent contributor and RAF veteran Derei< O'Connor writes from Amersham, Bucks, UK. Further reading: Flight Over Everest and The Puot's Book of Everest, both by Lord Clydesdale; First Over Everest: The Houston-Mount Everest Expedition 1933, by Air Commodore P.F.M. Fellowes; and Roof of the World: Man's First Flight Over Everest, by James Douglas-Hamilton.

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY

51

BONEYARD The world's second-largest air force stretches • wing to wing across four square miles ^"' of Arizona desert By Roy Stevenson

¡ed fighters, bombers and support aircraft—many of them decades ^ old—stand in neat rows as far as the eye can see. Warm winds stir flapping pieces of canvas and whistle across loose antenna wires. Tufts of dried brown grass sprinkle the ground, and the occasional tumbleweed drifts past the long lines of silent sentinels. A long-eared jackrabbit springs off into the distance between the massive hulks of two B-52 bombers, an unlikely juxtaposition of nature and machines of war. Walking among the 4,000-plus retired müitary aireraft at the 309th Aerospaee Maintenanee and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis-Monthan Air Foree Base, just south of Tucson, you understand why the faeüity has aequired its niekname "the Boneyard." Your first thought, as you pass row upon row of warbirds arranged in preeise herringbone patterns in Arizona's sun-bleaehed S o i ^ ^ Desert, is that it's luce a massive graveyard. But looks ean be deeeiving: Some of tïfë aircraft here are not quite dead yet. A tour of the AMARG Boneyard is an eerie, nostalgic journey dirough the pantheon of U.S. military aviation history. Almost every type of aircraft from the U.S. Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Navy, Marine Corps—even NASA—has ended up here awaiting its fate. More than 100 conventional aircraft types share space with a few surprises, like former presidential helicopters. Century Series fighters and a D-21 drone for an SR-71 Blackbird. Toss in a couple of MiGs, some converted müitary commercial aircraft, the gondola from the Navy's sole surviving postWWII airborne early-warning blimp and the odd Titan II missile reentry vehicle, and it's dear why a visit to AMARG is a rite of passage for aviation enthusiasts. The Boneyard had its genesis in 1946, when the U.S. müitary was looking for a place to store thousands of surplus WWII aircraft, primarily B-29s and C-47s.

52

AVIATION HISTORV

SEPTEMBER 2011

^T»Ci

r..*^^BëSî

W^

•i^w*-

A veritable Cold War armada of Boeing B-52s lies idle in the Sonora Desert sun at DavisMonthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz.

Davis-Monthan offered an ideal location because of its low humidity, sparse rainfall and high altitude, all of which minimize rust and corrosion. The hard alkaline topsoü, about 6 inches deep, with a clay-luce sublayer caUed "caliche," also provides an ideal platform for moving heavy aircraft around without having to pave large areas. In 1965 Davis-Monthan AFB was designated the Müitary Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center (MASDC), where au surplus müitary aircraft were to be consolidated. After the withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s, the total ntamber of aircraft stored here reached a staggering high of 6,080. In 1985 the facüity was renamed the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center (AMARC), a reflection of the additional tasks it performs, including aircraft maintenance, refurbishing and reactivation. The facüity also reclaims or cannibalizes parts, stores aircraft to be sold to foreign air forces, reconfigures airplanes as drone aerial targets, destroys and disposes of aircraft under various treaties and stores production tooling.

Most recently, in 2007 the facüity was renamed the 309th AMARC, under the 309th Maintenance Wing at Hül AFB in Utah. Despite its muitary designation, of the 1,011 people working for AMARC, only two are active duty Air Force personnel. Many of the civüian employees are retired from military service. Bus tours of the 2,600-acre facüity leavefi-omthe nearby Pima Air & Space Museum, itself weü worth a visit. The tour proceeds along "Celebrity Row," a three-quarter-müe-long paved road where one model of each aircraft stored at AMARC stands on display. The ghost planes are lined up along both sides, with signs in front of each indicating its type. The stories of some of these aircraft are fascinating. The Lockheed LC-130 Hercules Phoenix (tau no. 8321), for example, was embedded in ice in Antarctica for 17 years after working on Operation Deep Freeze for the National Science Foundation. The Hercules crashed foUowing a mishap with its rocket-assisted takeoff system. The Navy declared the Here a write-off, and it sank deep into

••iiiniir Arrayed by type, more than 4,000 aircraft await disposal or renovation by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group.

F-14 Tomcat no. 159437, credited with downing a Libyan MiG-23 in 1989, is preserved pendinq future restoration for museum display.

54 AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

Encased for 17 years in Antarctic ice, the LC-130 Hercules Phoenix was resurrected and flew for 10 more years before its retirement.

This MÍG-21F represents one of the earliest variants of the Soviet interceptor, which was once dubbed the "supersonic sport plane."

the ice, untu only its tail and propeller tips were visible. In 1988 it was dug out, repaired and flown for another 10 years before retiring to AMARG, stul in top condition. The F-14 (no. 159437) was one of two Tomcats from the carrier John F. Kennedy that shot down a pair of Libyan MiG-23 Floggers over the Gulf of Sidra on January 4, 1989, in a brief but exciting dogfight. The Floggers appeared to be heading straight for the Tomcats, despite the Americans' maneuvers indicating they were not looking for trouble. When the Floggers continued on a hostile path, the Tomcats first loosed AIM-7 Sparrow missues, which took out one of the MiGs, fol-

lowed by an AIM-9 Sidewinder that torched the second MiG. In 1979, C-141 Starlifter no. 40614 from the 53rd Military Airlift Squadron lost two engines immediately after takeoff from Richmond, Australia, en route to Alice Springs. Afirebroke out in the cargo hold, filling the airplane with thick smoke. The pilot veered toward a nearby riverbed to avoid hitting the town of Richmond, but then managed to return to the airport. The Starlifter landed trailing engine parts and fuel, with all crewmen surviving unhurt What becomes of these aircraft? AMARG uses a four-tiered classification system that determines their fate. Type 1000 aircraft are here for

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORV

55

AMARG

Inventory Totals as of March 2011

AIR FORCE A-10 177 A-7 1 B-1 15 B-52 110 B-57 12 C-12 2 C-123 2 C-130 133 C-135 203 C-137 50 1 C-14 C-141 4 1 C-15 C-18 2 C-21 20 C-22 1 C-5 13 C-9 3 D-21 5 F-100 1 F-101 1 F-106 2 F-111 164 F-15 213 F-16 574 F-4 359 F3B 1 FB-111 4 H-1 3 H-3 12 H-34 2 H-53 28 1 M-13 M-34 1 MiG-15 1 MiG-17 2 MiG-21 1 0-2 9 T-37 268 T-38 170 T-39 10 T-41 6 T-42 3 T-43 15 T-46 1 Total 2,607 ARMY OV-1 Total

Among the more exotic artifacts at Davis-Monthan is this gondola from a U.S. Navy early-warning blimp.

long-term storage, to be maintained untu recalled to active service, should the need arise. These aircraft are considered inviolate, meaning they have a high potential to return to flying status and no parts may be removed from them. They are "represerved" every four years. The Type 1000s include hundreds of F-16s that are scheduled to become remotely flown drone targets in the near ftiture. Nearly 1,000 aircraft have been processed here for conversion into drones since 1976—mainly F-100 Super Sabers, F-102 Delta Daggers, F-106 Delta Darts and F-4 Phantoms.

into place over the engine inlets and outlets. Workers apply a coating similar to car wax to the canopy or cockpit Plexiglas, and spray the aircraft with two coats of black latex material. Finally, a white vinyl coat of "Spraylat," which helps with temperature control, is sprayed on. Type 3000 aircraft are kept in near flyable condition in short-term storage, and are waiting at AMARG pending transfer to another unit, sale to another country or reclassification to one of the otlier three types. There are currently no Type 3000s at AMARG. Type 4000 aircraft have for the most part been gutted and nearly every usable part reclaimed. They wül eventually be broken down into scrap, smelted into ingots and recycled. Back at the Pima Air & Space Museum, the largest private air museum in the U.S., some 300 aircraft are spread over 80 acres. This museum, combined with the AMARG tour, is as good as it gets for aviation history buffs, "i"

The majority of the aircraft stored at AMARG are Type 2000s, used as a source of parts to keep other aircraft flying. In 2010, the 309th reclaimed 13,342 parts with an original value of $557.1 million. The crews puU the parts, then sea! the aircraft back up. Type 2000s are prepared for storage by draining the fuel and replacing it with lightweight ou, which is drawn through the engines by running them for a short time. The oil is then drained. Next the aircraft is given a thorough cleaning and moved to an area where the escape systems and ejection seats are deactivated. Then it's sealed with several coats of materials. Black plastic tape covers the canopy seams, and aluminized cloth is taped

Roy Stevenson is afteelance writer based in Seattle, Wash., who specializes in military and aviation history. Further reading: AMARG: America's Military Aircraft Boneyard, by Nicholas Veronico and Ron Strong (reviewed on P. 58). For tour information, seepimaair.org.

Two Titan II missile reentry cones lie in open storage.

The D-21 drone rode on the back of a Lockheed SR-71.

5 5

COAST GUARD C-130 2 U-25 13 Total 15

56 AVIATION HISTORY SEPTEMBER 2011

FOREIGN MILITARY SALES C-130 5 C-137 1 2 P-140 Total 8

Juan Thomas sprays protective sealant on a KC-135E Stratotanker in preparation for its storage at AMARG.

Mechanics of the 309th work on upgrades to A-10 Thunderbolt ii wings, doubiing the airpianes' service fife.

An A-10 undergoes maintenance at Davis-Monthan.

A jackrabbit enjoys the shade beneath a B-52 wing.

NAVY A-3 A-4 A-6 A-7 AV-8 C-1 C-12 C-130 C-131 C-18 C-2 C-24 C-4 C-9 E-2 F-14 F-4 F-8 FA-18 H-1 H-2 H-3 H-46 H-53 H-60 0-2 P-2 P-3 PA-31T S-3 T-1 T-2 T-34 T-39 Total NON-DOD C-12 C-130 C-131 C-137 C-22 C-27 C-9 H-1 H-3 H-6 H600 P-2 P-3 S-2 T-39 Total

11 142 167 69 4 2 17 35 9 1 5 1 7 9 26 13 9 4 93 34 40 29 56 60 28 7 2 135 1 110 1 113 18 22 1,280

4 4 1 1 1 4 1 26 22 19 10 1 5 1 1 101

Grand Total 4,016

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY 57

REVIEWS BOOKS

HOW THE

HELICOPTER CHANGED MODERN

WARFARE

HOW THE HELICOPTER CHANGED MODERN WARFARE by Walter J. Boyne, Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, La., 2011, $29.95.

In his outstanding history of the helicopter's contributions to the last 60 years of warfare, renowned aviation historian (and Aviation History contributing editor) Walter Boyne contends that choppers are the neglected stepchild in the family of military aircraft. He makes a convincing case that through the latter half of their six decades of frontline service, combat helicopters have not kept pace technologically with their fixedwing counterparts. Yes, the "helicopter has unquestionably had great effect upon modern warfare," he reasons. However, the exemplary progression of rotorcraft from reconnaissance oddity to Hfesaving medevac platform, and from indispensable troop transport to dedicated gunship, ultimately slowed to an agonizing stagnancy. It is astounding to learn that 43 percent of American helicopters in the Vietnam War were lost in action, a lamentable statistic that would be bad enough if the story ended there. Unfortunately, as Boyne makes clear, cutting-edge breakthroughs such as stealth technology that have since made fixed-wing aircraft more effective have failed to materialize for rotorcraft. There have been notable attempts to advance the helicopter's state of the art. But such promising programs as the advanced-propulsion Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne and the stealthy Sikorsky-Boeing RAH-66 Comanche were unceremoniously canceled after schedule delays, cost overruns and technical problems. In what should be required reading for military, government and industry leaders, Boyne offers a set of organizational solutions that would blend combat requirements with what contractors can realistically deliver within a five-year timeline at a fair and unalterable price. To be sure, overcoming the physical limi-

58

AVIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

tations presented by the retreating blade stall phenomenon is daunting. Even the brawniest off-the-shelf helicopters are generally unable to exceed 180 knots. Yet if the same research and development resources were applied to helicopters as have been expended on fixed-wing aircraft, then it might have been possible, and may still be, to bridge the technological divide. This is the best overall analysis of helicopters at war ever written, arguably destined to become the standard reference on the subject. It brims with historical information, including dramatic stories of brilliant inventors and heroic aircrews. Fittingly, Boyne's final point is that helicopters have made their mark on modern warfare thanks mainly to the remarkable men and women who have operated them under the most adverse conditions. Philip Handleman AHARG: America's Miiitary Aircraft Boneyard

be recycled. Most declined to use Herkimer's parts, leading the government to search for a way forward with that and thousands of other planes. So began the requirement to save, reclaim or otherwise recoup as many taxpayer doUars as possible. Managed by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, AMARG is unofficially known as "the Boneyard." Today the faculty houses an impressive array of air assets, much of it held in strategic reserve for possible future use. AMARG's authors note that "traveling to the Sonoran Desert to view the military's aircraft storage facility has become something of a sacred pilgrimage for aviation enthusiasts." This book is a pre-tour "must read" for anyone who's planning to visit the remarkable collection of warbirds preserved near Tucson. CV.Glines

MTSSIOI

by Nicholas A. Veronico and Ron Strong, Specialty Press, North Branch, Minn., 2010, $24.95. The sight of more than 4,000 military aircraft at parade rest in Arizona's desert is mind-boggling. There are bombers, fighters and transports that date from World War II to those of recent jet vintage (see related story, P. 52). This book by a seasoned science writer and a devotee of aircraft photography serves as a great introduction to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. It is is illustrated with 325 excellent color and black-and-white photos. After WWII, more than 30,000 surplus aircraft were crowded onto a handful of bases in Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. The problems associated with these surplus planes lirst came to light in November 1943 when Herkimer, a warweary B-24D Liberator, was stripped of its engines, instruments, radios and hundreds of other parts. When officials discovered it took 783 man-hours to reduce the aircraft to nearly 33,000 pounds of parts, aviation industry reps were asked to see what could

ROBERT f. Dii.ii, « . .

MISSION TO BERLÍN: The American Airmen Wiio Struck the Heart of Hitier's Reicii

by Robert F. Dorr, Zenith, Minneapolis, 2011, $28.

Bob Dorr follows up on his well-received book Hell Hawks (co-authored by Thomas Jones) with this masterpiece, which details the famous February 3,1945, American daylight raid on Berlin. In doing so. Dorr has written five books in one. The obvious book relates just how daring, complex and demanding the raid was, even in the last year of the war. The second book paints a picture of the air war as a whole. The third explores the historical and technical foundations of the raid, relating how Allied and Axis aircraft and weapons were developed and how they performed over the length of the war. The fourth and perhaps most important book is a subliminal message, pointing out that while the United States in 1945 could deploy a massive arsenal of weapons—including 15,000 airmen in more than 1,000 aircraft, to deliver death to an enemy who

REVIEWS lacked the capacity to harm Americans at home—today, faced with an enemy that threatens our homeland, we are having difficulty ftinding our miUtary forces. By virtue of his in-depth research and broad background. Dorr has far surpassed the now ubiquitous "Ambrose approach"— using personal accounts to advance a story line. He incorporates a minute-by-minute account of the raid as the book's skeleton, driving the narrative forward as the mission progresses. He teUs the stories of many of the individuals involved, fi-om commanders such as Jinnmy DooUttle down to the men pUoting bombers and fighters. You learn exactly how a beUy gunner operates his turret; how the püot and copüot start, taxi, take off and fly the aircraft; how navigators plot their courses amid huge formations; and how hard bombardiers struggle—sometimes even after they have been grievously wounded—to land their bombs on target. For any reader who's just beginning to delve into the history of World War II air combat. Mission to Berlin is a soup-to-nuts crash course in itself. Dorr's notes and bibliography can point anyone to comprehensive knowledge. Any expert wül be gratified by the consistent manner in which the author ties the events he is describing to other lesserknown facts, such as the introduction of the Azon bomb. Dorr's pointülist style enables him to create a great mural of the war, with thousands of tiny dots of details. The result is pure reading pleasure. Walter J. Boyne

FIAT CR.42 ACES OF WORLD WAR 2 by Hakan Gustavsson and Ludovico Slongo, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, England, 2009, $22.95. When contests are held for the most beautiful fighter of World War II, there are many votes for the Supermarine Spitfire, FockeWulf Fw-190, Messerschmitt Me-262 and others. But if the contest was narrowed down to WWII's most beautiful biplane fighter, the Fiat CR.42 would win hands down.

DINKY TOYS AIRCRAFT A New Must-Have Reference Book! • Covers all the aircraft toys from 1934 to 1979 • Over 500 color photos • Each toy has complete details, including history, description, scale, etc. Preview the 6oo/< and order your copy at:

blurb.com/1ny/book/detail/2i492oa

Rain of Fire B-29s Over Japan, 1945 by Charles L. Phillips, Jr. Colonel USAF (Ret.) The remarkable story from a 26-year old Captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps, piloting B-29s during the final stages of WWII in the Pacific Theatre. Beginning on Thanksgiving Day 1944, B-29 firebomb raids began on Japan from Saipan in the Mariana Islands. Receiving a Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting the largest planes used during WWII, one of his last missions was August 6th, 1945 - the day of Hiroshima - the same day he was forced to ditch his aircraft into the sea.

Commendation by Curtis E. LeMay, General U.S. Air Force (Ret.) "I have read Colonel Phillips' account of his part in our 1945 assault against Japan, and I liked it. His viewpoint is that of a pilot/aircraft commander in a bomb squadron fiying from Saipan, and then as a squadron operations officer dealing with the crews who fiew the missions up over Japan." "To me, it is important for us all to realize that the time period he covers was the only time in the history of military aviation that trae strategic air power was actually put to proper use and air power had done what all its early pioneers had said could be done." "His is an accurate account. I commend its reading to you."

Curtis E. LeMay

9x12 Book, 209pp., ISBN 1-891030-32-9. Forward by Gen. JackJ. Cation, USAF (Ret.), Commander of SAC 15th AF, MiUtary Airlift Command (MAC, and the Air Force Logistics Command AFLC) prior to his retirement in 1974 with four-star rank.

$25.00 Covers shipping and handling. Send check or M.O. to 3rd printing. Limited supply available.

STEVE ZEECE, SR. 202 West Country Rd. B. Roseville, MN 55113 SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY

59

Italy's air force and aviation industry have generally been given short shrift by historians, perhaps because of a distaste for bombastic dictator Benito Mussolini or because, in general, the Regia Aeronáutica did not do very well in combat. Notwithstanding all that, the CR.42 Falco has been singled out for generous praise through the years, in part for its aesthetics and in part for how well it performed in spite of its obsolescence. The skill and gallantry of Italian pilots, who loved the CR.42 for its aerobatic qualities, did much to preserve its popularity. The authors emphasize those distinctions throughout. For example, one caption, on P. 19, manages to encapsulate the flair of an Italian CR.42 pilot battling a Gloster Gladiator, niuminating the encounter against the realities of desert combat and also celebrating the Falco's mystique. That page alone is worth the price of the book. The CR.42 entered service with the Regia Aeronáutica in 1939, and was also exported to Belgium, Germany, Hungary and Sweden. Even after Italy's surrender in 1943, the Falco continued fighting for both Germany and the Allies. The CR.42 produced more than 50 aces (not all of whom flew it exclusively). The top Falco ace, Mario Visintini, scored his 16 victories over Ethiopia. Excellent writing, comprehensive subject coverage, wonderful photos and great color profiles make Fiat CR.42 Aces of World War 2 worthy of a spot in your library. Walter J.Boyne

This two-hour DVD incorporates modern cinematography, archival newsreels, photos and artifacts, in addition to commentary by aerobatics experts Patti Wagstaff and Julie Clark, historians and the racers' families and friends. We also get to hear racer Elinor Smith reminisce about her own experiences, and those of her fellow competitors (Smith, who went on to set multiple solo and endurance speed and altitude records, died in March 2010). There were actually two races: Of the 19 women who took off on August 18 (plus one who didn't get off the ground until the 19th), 14flewplanes classed as heavyweight and SÍKflewlightweights. The mostly homegrown group included German Thea Rasche and Australian Jessie "Chubby" Keith-Miller. Aircraft maintenance was part of the contest. In fact, Amelia Earhart and other competitors fought hard to change an original rule that would have put a mechanic in the cockpit with eachflier.These women wanted to prove they could make their own repairs when necessary. Given the grueling schedule (in addition to days spent Oying, they had to get dressed up and attend a "rubber chicken" banquet almost every time they landed), they got plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their mechanical expertise. Besides mechanical glitches and weather, they coped with navigation difficulties, accidents and illness—including one case of typhoid fever. Several aircraft were also sabotaged, necessitating additional security measures. On the race's second day. Marvel Crosson, who held the women's altitude record, died BREAKING THROUGH when her Travel Air crashed in Arizona. The BREAKING THE CLOUDS: tragedy hit hard, occasioning talk of abanTHROUGH "E CLOUDS' The First Women's doning the contest, but in the end the fliers Nationai Air Derby decided Crosson would have wanted them Archetypal Images, to continue. Louise Thaden came in first in a Columbia, Md., Travel Air in the heavyweight group. Phoebe ^tf4 2010, $30. Omlie, flying a Velie Monocoupe, claimed the lightweight trophy. You could say the First Women's National Whue Thaden—^who dedicated her troAir Derby began as an "opener act," meant phy to Crosson—would later be victorious to attract attention to the 1929 Cleveland in the Bendix Trophy Race and win the Air Races. What quickly became known as Harmon Trophy in 1936, she later described the first "Powder Puff Derby" began in Santa the first Women's Air Derby as her proudest Monica, Calif., and was timed to finish in moment. Despite a few minor editing flaws. Cleveland nine days later, during the men's Breaking Through the Clouds shows why this races. As Breaking Through the Clouds makes first cross-country race for women was a abundantly clear, the women hoped to show watershed event in aviation as a whole. the world they couldflyas well as men. Nan Siegel

DVDs

60

AUIATION HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2011

CLASSICS THE ALUMINUM TRAIL: Ciiina-Burma-lndia, Worid War il, 19421945: How and Wiiere Tiiey Died

by Chick Marrs Quinn This is unlike any other World War II book. It has no plot, no narrative, more than 3,000 characters and 476 pages of data documenting 696 fatal airplane crashes in the ChinaBurma-India Theater. It gives the date of the crash, aircraft type, lists the crew members on board and their fates, and chronicles any other established facts about each incident. As such, it's truly an encyclopedia of the cost of the air war in the CBI, from the laconic ("Aircraft left Kunming at 0900 and has not been heard from since. Crew declared administratively dead.") to a three-page report on B-24 no. 8308, shot down November 14, 1943, over Burma (a report that describes in considerable detail the crash, capture, losses and survivors of a 10-man crew). The Aluminum Trail, for example, chronicles the actions of Major Horace S. CarsweU, who stayed with his wounded crew members, attempting to land their crippled B-24, and was killed when the bomber hit a mountain in southern China. CarsweU was posthumously awarded the only CBI Medal of Honor. Equally heroic were Major Carrol D. Gregory and 2nd Lt. Ralph R. Young, who rode their C-47 down on February 7, 1945, refusing to abandon their 35 Chinese passengers. After bauing out of his C-46,2nd Lt. HiUyer G. Maveety wandered into Japanese territory. Found by Burmese, he offered them 800 rupees to guide him to safety, but they turned him over to the Japanese, who executed him. A British intelligence agent, a Gurkha, discovered the Allied pilot's fate and later reported: "These Burmese, their sin was great. I have executed!" The reason Quinn devoted years of research to this book is clear: Her husband, 1st Lt. Loyal Stuart Marrs Jr., was kuled over "the Hump" on February 27, 1945, while flying a C-109 from India to China. Originally published in 1989, her book has been out of print until recently, when the late Quinn's family authorized reprints from Hunter Printing, now available via Amazon. Robert LWillett

By Bernard Dy

AIRWAHE Gotha G.V Bomber

Rise of Flight add-on offers a new perspective on World War I air combat he developers of -Rise of Flight, the impressive World War I flight simulation reviewed in the January issue of Aviation History, continue to enhance that package, creating more purchasable aircraft. One recent add-on is the Gothaer Waggonfabrik Gotha G.V bomber ($15, requires Microsoft 64-bit Windows XPA^ista/7 and an installed copy of Rise of Flight, Intel 3Ghz quad core processor or comparable, 4GB RAM, 10GB hard drive space, 1GB 3-D video card, 777 Studios, riseofûight.com), which is a very interesting airplane tofly.Whue 777 Studios now offers several aircraft, I selected the Gotha G.V in honor of the approaching anniversary of the bomber's August 1917 service debut. Since I've read considerably less about the Gotha G.V than later aircraft, I found out the hard way that many surprises await its puots. What I learned about the G.V seems to be borne out well by the sim developers' efforts. This big biplane bomber is beautiful to watch, but can be ungainly to puot, and full of contradictions. Where most aircraft tend to fly better when lighter, the G.V seems more stable at altitude when loaded. Though it's temperamental when free of its bombload, it is certainly easier to coax a lighter G.V to lift off the ground. Another contradiction: If you apply too much aileron, the control input behaves as if it had been reversed. Gotha pilots had to respect this large beast, constantly using gende, controlled movements to keep it in line. This proved to be true in my sim flights. Long flights must have been stressful and tiring for the real pilots. Another historical aspect borne out by the simulation is how challenging it can be to land this big bomber. Landings reportedly resulted in significant damage to Gothas. And therein lies another contradiction: I found the G.V needs some power to maintain enough stability for landing, yet that amount of force led me to flip over on touchdown several times. Had I been a

T

GET SMART, KNOW MORE Now On Newsstands! Debacle to decisive victory inTay Ninh; the American who taught Giap how to lob a grenade; the last Marines out; how to steal a navy

more ACTION German WWI pilot, I think I could have been the undoing of the Luftstreitkräfte all by myself. The Germans later added extra landing gears, called Stossfahrastell, to compensate. These apparently worked well, though they're not modeled in Rise of Flight's version of the G.V. Yet my landings were not fatal, since the sim version of the G.V never caught fire, unlike its predecessor, the G.IV—owing to a design improvement that moved fuel storage away from the engines, relocating it behind the pilot's seat. This move indeed improved the fire risk, but some sources point out it came at the expense of losing a gangway, which had allowed the crew to reach the tail gun position. Since the Rise of Flight G.V clearly has an gangway, there's a potential discrepancy here, though not one that tangibly affects gameplay. Finally, kudos to the artists who have done a fine job with re-creating various surface textures, insignia, cockpit detaus and lozenge camouflage for the bomber. The Gotha G.V and its older siblings in the series were not the only bombers in action nearly a century ago, but they were among the pioneers in day and night bombing. Gotha strikes over London served as a precursor to Germany's WWII attacks on the British capital, while its restrictions as a two-engine bomber can be seen as a preview of the Luftwaffe's limitations in that later conflict. Rise of Flight gives players a chance to appreciate the courage of the men who flew the Gotha, as well as the bomber's gracefulness in the air. "±"

The men of the Texas Brigade bonded together into one of the Confederacy's best fighting units during the winter of 1861.

more INTRIGUE The 82nd Airborne's Jim Gavin pioneered airborne operations while defining true leadershipjump after jump.

more INSIGHT ENJOYTHESE MAGAZINES FROM THE WEIDER HISTORY GROUP AMERICAN HISTORY AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR BRITISH HERITAGE CIVIL WAR TIMES WILDWEST MILITARY HISTORY QUARTERLY AVIATION HISTORY MILITARY HISTORY VIETNAM WORLD WAR II ARMCHAIR GENERAL

SEPTEMBER 2011 AVIATION HISTORY

63

By Jon Guttman

FLIGHT TEST Thinking Big

That Essentiai Factor

How many of these big bombers—successful and not—can you identify?

1. Which of these World War I fighter aces started out as ground crewmen? A. Georges Guynemer B. Ernest J. Elton C. James McCudden D. All of the above

l.Vickers Valiant

A.

2. Gotha G.III

B.

3. Dornier Do-19 C. 4. Petlyakov Pe-8 D.

2. Mechanic Roger Pochon served as observergunner in which ace's first victory? A. Georges Guynemer B. Charles Nungesser C. René Dorme D. Jean Martenot de Cordoux

5. Caproni Ca.5 E. 6. Handley Page Halifax F. 7. Amíot 143

G.

8. Farman 50Bn2

H.

9. Convair B-58 Hustler

I.

10. Tupolev Tu-22 "Blinder"

Match James McCudden's squadron mate to his score and claim to fame. A. Gerald J.C. Maxwell

1. 28

B. Richard A. Maybery

2. 8; author of Sagittarius Rising

C. Albert Ball

3. 32, including several German aces

D. Arthur P.F. Rhys Davids

4. 16, including five in one day

E. Leonard M. Barlow

5. 6; author of Wind in the Wires

F. Cecil A. Lewis

6. 21; KIA

G. Geoffrey H. Bowman

7. 26; brother of WWII ace

H. Henry J. Burden

8. 25, including Werner Voss; KIA

I. Duncan GrinneU-Milne

9. 20, including three in three minutes

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEVIN JOHNSON

4. Which World War I ace designed and built one of history's classic STOL aircraft in 1936? A. Ernst Udet B. Gerhard Fieseler C. Marcel Bloch D. Alexander de Seversky

J.

Fighting Fifty-Six

J. Reginald T.C. Hoidge

3. Which ace often helped his mechanics work on his aircraft or engine? A. Georges Guynemer B. Albert Ball C. Werner Voss D. All of the above

5. Which of these daredevU puots earned a Ph.D. in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? A. James H. Doolittle B. Roscoe Turner C. Ernst Udet D. Pancho Barnes

v s 'g'^ 'a'e 'g"r rl 'ST VH f o 'n '6'a '8"a 'orD '9'g xig-Xyy Su voi 'D'6 'd'8 'a'z. 'i'9 H's 'g> 're 'OT

10. 44; Victoria Cross recipient; KIA

SEPTEMBER 2011

AVIATION HISTORY

65