Aviation History 2014-05

DOWNING DORA NINE A Novel by Matthew Patrick

Aviation as you’ve never known it, formed in the crucible of a Great War —on American soil, with American blood, in the continuing struggle between the Sovereign States … First novel of the Sovereign States series • Illustrated by John Patrick

Aviation has just been born, in a world that has followed a historical trajectory very dif-

ferent from our own. The United States Constitution was never ratifed; the United States was never formed. Instead, North America is occupied by fve separate sovereign nationstates that emerged after a century of violence from the original thirteen colonies. The story revolves around two young fiers, Englishman William Hastings and Prussian Heinrich von Gotha, who get tangled in a looming confict within the Sovereign State of Carolina. As a result they become the world’s frst veterans of aerial warfare. All of the technological terrors that Europe experienced with the coming of World War I have been transported to North America through the magic of fction. The story is illustrated in a style reminiscent of the early 20th century. The combination of prose and paint, so rare in modern fction, provides a vibrant portal into this brooding world. ••••• Kindle ebook now available at amazon.com Learn more at paradromepress.com

Why the P-38 Flunked in Europe

22

By Robert F. Dorr In 1941, 87 percent of prospective U.S. military pilots wanted to fy the twin-engine Lightning. But most weren’t really ready for such a complex fghter.

Amazing But True Stories

30

By Stephan Wilkinson Ten aviation tales that are altogether stranger than fction.

Stopgap Interceptors

36

By E.R. Johnson At the dawn of the Cold War, the F-89, F-94 and F-86D/L bore the brunt of the Soviet bomber threat. 44 The Forgotten Bomber

By Martin Hill Nearly every Allied air force in North Africa and the Mediterranean depended on the workhorse Martin Baltimore during WWII—except the Americans.

Link to the Future

48

By Richard Bauman Ed Link’s fight training simulators have prepared hundreds of thousands of pilots for the real thing.

Nostalgia in the Cards

54

By Dick Smith “Sky Birds” trading cards inspired a generation of aviators in the 1930s.

14

Mailbag Briefng Extremes

16

Aviators By Dan Heaton

7 8

By Robert Guttman Bristol’s Brabazon was Britain’s largest airplane.

While searching for Pancho Villa, Byron Jones drew fre in Mexico. 18

Restored By Jan Forsgren The B-17G Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby has come full circle.

Letter From Aviation History 61 Reviews 65 Flight Test By Jon Guttman 66 Aero Poster 21

The RAF Red Arrows fy in V-formation against the backdrop of a late-winter sunset. This photo is among the award-winning images on display at the RAF Museum in London (story, P. 10).

Cover: Rob Ator pilots

the P-38J Ruff Stuff over Wisconsin in 2010. While Lockheed’s Lightning reigned supreme in the Pacifc, its combat record over Europe was checkered at best (story, P. 22).

Cover: Tyson Rininger/TVR Photography Above: ©2013 British Crown Copyright

THE SEARCH FOR THE SANDMAN Editor iN CHiEF roger L. Vance

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THE DISAPPEARANCE OF A HISTORIC WW II B-24 BOMBER One of the most incredible stories to come out of the war. You’ll go on a video journey with pilot Robert W. Sternfels and witness a mystery fnally unfold that has baffed war historians and haunted Sternfels for more than 60 years. Told in part by Sternfels, whose determination inspired others halfway around the world to help him bring about an astonishing conclusion. Never before seen footage!

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Avro Ansons landed safely after colliding.

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www.HistoryNet.com Discussion: Aviation has more than its share of amazing survival stories and bizarre flying incidents (story, P. 30). What’s the strangest flying-related tale you’ve ever heard? Aviation History Magazine is on Facebook 4 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

10 Greatest Emergency Landings Proof that any landing you walk away from is a good landing: our picks for the best-ever set-downs under dire circumstances. Death by P-38 As surely as he had been killed by an assassin’s bullet, Japanese Admiral isoroku Yamamoto died in a long-range attack by P-38Gs in April 1943. Jet Aircraft Development The jet engine’s emergence unlocked a Pandora’s box of problems for aeronautical designers to solve.

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MAILBAG Oblique-Wing Book

Classroom Perspective

The March issue of Aviation History was excellent. I was particularly struck by Mark Wolverton’s article on the AD-1 [“Extremes”], which I saw flying many times at Edwards (and I knew many of its pilots, including Dick Gray, who sadly was killed in a spin accident in a NASA T-37).

The article by Joe Bullmer on the famous picture of the Wright brothers [“The Power of a Picture,” January] was thoughtful and raised interesting questions about early flight. If I was still teaching aviation history, I would certainly use the piece in my classroom. Bullmer did a nice job mentioning a number of pioneers who had hops in heavier-than-air craft. As he knows, there were many others. The French, of course, can claim Félix du Temple had the first powered hop in 1874. In class I challenged my students to acknowledge the great accomplishment of the Wrights, but not for what they did on December 17, 1903. I suggested that the most important moment in American and world aviation took place on October 5, 1905. On that date, Wilbur Wright flew the Flyer III 30 circles around the field, for a total of 24 miles in 39 minutes, before landing. It was longer than all of the 109 flights made by the Wrights in 1903 and 1904. At that point, the brothers flew a real airplane in powered and controlled flight. In the words of Tom Crouch, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, that long flight demonstrated “one of the most extraordinary machines in the history of technology.” When you think about it, the event that occurred on October 5, 1905, makes the law passed by the Connecticut legislature seem a bit silly. The latter created “Powered Flight Day” in honor of Gustave Whitehead. And just how many miles and turns did he fly in his “aircraft”? James K. Libbey Professor Emeritus Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

I’m not sure Wolverton was aware of this, but NASA recently issued a book on the AD-1 that is absolutely fascinating: Thinking Obliquely: Robert T. Jones, the Oblique Wing, NASA’s AD-1 Demonstrator, and its Legacy, written by Bruce I. Larrimer. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, it discusses efforts to modify the AD-1 into a joinedwing demonstrator, covering the proposed F-8 program in detail (and why it was not pursued), and also chronicling many of the proposed commercial and military applications of the oblique wing. Finally, it won the prestigious History Manuscript Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Readers might be interested to know that it is available as a free download from nasa.gov/ connect/ebooks. Dick Hallion Shalimar, Fla.

Just the FACs I was fascinated by the article on the Covey FACs in the November 2013 issue. I was a FAC in Vietnam, covering the Korean Capital Division in the last year of the war. While I didn’t have the same experiences the Coveys had flying the Ho Chi Minh Trail (my time was spent in northern II Corps, along Vietnam’s coast), I could identify with their enthusiasm on finding the huge storage area.

The tale of continuous secondary explosions reminded me of the one time I found such a target in my area of responsibility. I worked several sets of fighters on the target and got secondary explosions on nearly every pass. The fighter pilots were also highly elated in working such a target because it was unusual in South Vietnam to find one like this. We really felt like we were doing something useful. I also find your magazine useful in my work as a lecturer on the history of aviation at the University of Delaware’s Ossher Life Long Learning Institute (Wilmington campus). I usually finish my copy in the first couple of days after receiving it. And each time I find that I have to tweak my presentation in several places because there’s something in each issue that is new and useful to me in my lectures. Ray Hain Wilmington, Del.

Crossfield Fan I have been a fan of Scott Crossfield since his rocket ship days and the final X-15 flight. I was very fortunate to attend a meeting of the American Society for Quality Control in Los Angeles in the 1960s when Crossfield was the featured speaker. He was outstanding in describing some of his complicated X-15 flights. But the very noticeable feature of his presentation was afterward, when he opened it up for questions from the floor. People stood up and queried him, sometimes on one or more subjects in the form of one long question. He would listen carefully, then repeat the convoluted question in simple points, and answer each point very fluently. He had a twinkle in his eye and a warm presentation. Everyone in the room admired him. I appreciate the fine article you published [“Skyrocketing Through Mach 2,” January]. Bill Battis Sun City West, Ariz. Send letters to Aviation History Editor, Weider History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500, or e-mail to [email protected]. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 7

BRIEFING

jim weeden; below: eric berens

‘Wichita Fokker’ Takes Flight

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he frst production Travel Air, the Model 2000, was an Above: Eric Berens’ Travel Air 2000 makes its frst fight since American classic. It was the frst successful replacement 1937. Below: The Model 2000’s superfcial resemblance to the for the weary, worn-out, war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennys Fokker D.VII earned it a role in Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels. that in the mid-1920s comprised the bulk of the country’s civil feet. It was built by a company founded by Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman, pioneers who, along with William T. Piper, would go on to own the worldwide general aviation market. And between 1924 and 1929, more Travel Airs, including 2000s, were built than were any other make of airplane. Retired Delta pilot Eric Berens’ newly restored 1929 Model 2000 had a pretty easy life. In 84 years, it has fown just over 700 hours free of crop-dusting, bush fying and barnstorming. From October 1937 until Brodhead, Wis., Travel Air specialist Kent McMakin began restoring the Berens airplane in September 2008, the airframe and engine sat on the same North Dakota family’s farm near Fargo, dry and indoors, the engine even kept warm in mid-January he had put 13 hours on the open-cockpit airplane. winter, without ever being fown. Berens bought the fabric- (No small feat: It was 20 below in Stevens Point, Wis., when I last stripped hulk from the son of the same man who’d put it up on spoke with him.) Berens found it straightforward and delightful blocks in 1937—and who had soloed in it just a year earlier. to fy, with particular praise for the counterbalanced ailerons— Restoration consisted largely of sandblasting and polyurethaning which helped make the original Travel Air 2000 a flm star. Travel Airs resembled World War I Fokker D.VII fghters, the the steel-tube airframe, re-covering and painting it in original “Travel Air Blue,” replacing the tailskid with a Stinson 108 tail- similarity enhanced by the fact that both airplanes had what were familiarly called elephant-ear ailerons. To wheel, adding period instrumentation to make his remarkably realistic air combat an airplane that in its most basic form Air Quotes flm Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes used didn’t even have an airspeed indicator, inTravel Air 2000s to fesh out his small stalling a scrupulously detailed interior “Fighting in the air is not feet of real D.VIIs. As a result, this most using original fabrics and renovating the American of airplanes was forever thereliquid-cooled Curtiss OXX-6 V8 engine. sport. It is scientifc murder.” after nicknamed the “Wichita Fokker.” Berens made the Travel Air’s frst post–Captain Eddie Rickenbacker Stephan Wilkinson restoration fight last November, and by 8 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

Osprey Settles Into New Nest

photos: u.s. air force

The Air Force’s oldest CV-22 arrives at its new home in December 2013.

A

fter Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines in November 2013, some of the frst rescue and relief aircraft to arrive on the scene included four MV-22 Ospreys operated by the U.S. Marine Corps as part of Operation Damayan. The unique qualities of the tilt-rotor aircraft, including range, cargo space and VTOL ability, made it an ideal choice for delivering supplies to hard-hit areas that were diffcult, if not impossible, to access by other means. Just one month later, the Air Force’s oldest Osprey (a CV-22), originally built as a preproduction aircraft for the U.S. Navy, would enter retirement at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. The Osprey had been used exclusively in fight tests, but between its posts at Edwards Air Force Base in 2005, and later with the 413th Flight Test Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Fla., it completed more than 600 test missions.

Given its record in both humanitarian and war efforts, it’s tempting to view the aircraft as a success story. But that belies its controversial history. In 1986 the Department of Defense awarded a contract to a joint development team from Bell Helicopter and Boeing Helicopter, with a budget of about $2.5 billion, for the V-22 program. Within just two years that budget had ballooned to more than $30 billion. Various performance issues combined with budget battles have plagued its history as well, prolonging development. Ultimately, fight tests wouldn’t begin until 1997, with the Marine Corps taking its frst feet in December 2005 and the Air Force receiving its frst examples in 2006. As recently as June 2013, the Department of Defense awarded contracts to the Bell-Boeing team calling for about 100 additional Ospreys, most going to the Marine Corps and due in September 2019. Martin A. Bartels

©daily mail/rex/alamy

Mystery Ship

The Osprey is the most recent addition to the museum’s stable.

What is this, and what does it have to do with SSTs? Turn to P. 12 for the answer.

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 9

BRIEFING

RAF’s Best Photos

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photos: ©2013 british crown copyright

f you’re planning a trip to Britain this spring, consider visiting the RAF Museum London’s Colindale site to see some amazing aviation pictures. On display there until April 28 are the winners of the 24th annual RAF Photographic Competition. In presenting this year’s top honors, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford stressed the wealth of experience that was conveyed in the more than 1,200 entries, saying: “These dynamic images refect the extensive breadth of Royal Air Force life, the critical contribution that our personnel are making to UK Defence and operations around the world.” Entry to the photography exhibit is free, as is admission to the Colindale museum, conveniently situated just a half-hour Tube ride from central London. To fnd out more about the photographs or the museum, visit rafmuseum.org/whatson.

Award-winning photos on exhibit at the RAF Museum at Colindale include a “hot start” for a Memorial Flight Spitfre (above left), abseil instructors plunging from a Puma helicopter (above right) and a Tornado fying over London, judged Photograph of the Year.

10 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

BRIEFING

O

WASPs On Parade Congressional Gold Medal (now on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center), and the following year every former member or member’s family received a bronze medal. WASP veterans were in the news this past winter when several of the women

frederick m. brown/getty images

f the more than 1,000 women who served the United States as Women Airforce Service Pilots, 38 died during the group’s brief existence. Even though their hard work and fying skills had freed up male pilots for combat in World War II, when the WASP

Former Women Airforce Service Pilots were guests of honor on a Rose Parade foat.

program was abruptly ended in December 1944, the women pilots did not receive any veterans’ benefts. Not until 33 years later did the survivors fnally begin to get any substantive recognition, when in 1977 they received retroactive partial status as veterans. More recently, the WASP organization was honored in 2009 with the

T

participated in the 2014 Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day. They rode on a gorgeous foat complete with a fower-decked aircraft. To learn more about the women pilots, visit the WASP museum website at wasp museum.org or check out the offcial archive at twu.edu/library/wasp.asp.

Flying Saucer or “Flying Fish”?

©transoceans

wo years after their frst attempt, when in England, two hours and 23 minutes they were stymied by bad weather in later. The French media nicknamed the balloon the “Flying Fish.” 2011, two FrenchCollaborating with men crossed the EnAir Liquide, which supglish Channel via an plied the helium that electric-powered hot filled the balloon’s air balloon, Iris Chal­ shell, the aeronauts lenger II. On Septemnext hope to cross the ber 4, 2013, Gérard Mediterranean and Feldzer and Pierre Atlantic. Air Liquide Chabert took off from noted the Channel fight Cap Gris Nez, France, was just “the frst step of at 7:30 a.m. and landed at Littlestone on Sea, Iris Challenger II fies to England. the Transoceans project

12 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

Mystery ship Answer During the 1950s, British research into supersonic transports faced a dilemma regarding the short wingspans necessary to minimize drag versus the need for controllability at low speeds. Around 1955 Dietrich Küchemann at the Royal Aircraft Establishment discovered that delta wings generated large vortices over the wings while fying at low speeds and high angles of attack. To test this phenomenon Handley Page designed the H.P.115, essentially a low-aspect-ratio wing with a 75degree sweep and a 20-foot span, attached to a pilot’s nacelle, vertical stabilizer and Bristol Siddeley Viper BSV.9 turbojet yielding 1,900 pounds of static thrust. Its fixed undercarriage was taken from a Percival Prentice and nose wheel from a Short Aerovan. The H.P.115 frst few on August 17, 1961, at RAE Bedford, and in spite of its slapped-together appearance, the aircraft performed its intended task very well. Test pilot J.M. Henderson demonstrated its maneuverability and controllability at speeds as low as 65 mph. The project yielded signifcant data on the low-speed fight characteristics of delta wings, including the nose-up attitude taken by all SSTs during landing. Neil Armstrong’s selection as an astronaut precluded his test-fying it in 1962, but he fnally got to pilot it on June 22, 1970. H.P.115 XP841 is now on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton, alongside a Concorde prototype. Jon Guttman whose aim is to carry out major crossings, explorations and scientifc missions using means of transportation powered by environmentally friendly renewable energies, repeating the exploits of the pioneers in the feld of aeronautics with the resources of tomorrow.”

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EXTREMES

By Robert Guttman

Bristol Brabazon The largest airplane ever built by Britain was also among the most controversial

14 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

airbus, filton

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n December 1942, even as World War II was still raging, the British government felt suffciently confdent of victory to form a committee to determine what types of aircraft Britain’s airline industry would require after the confict. Headed by Air Minister John T.C. Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara, the so-called Brabazon Committee came up with a series of recommendations for fve different categories of airliners. By far the most ambitious was its “Type 1,” which specifed a 100-ton, eight-engine, land-based airliner capable of carrying 100 passengers a distance of 5,500 miles at a cruising speed of 250 mph. Eventually built and fown, and named after the chairman of the committee that conceived it, the Bristol Brabazon remains the largest airplane ever built in Britain. It also remains a subject of controversy. Some have described it as an engineering masterpiece and the precursor of the modern jumbo jet, but it’s also been dismissed as a useless and expensive white elephant that nobody in the airline industry really wanted. The Bristol Aeroplane Company was selected to develop the Type 1 airliner because it had already been working on a preliminary design study for a 100-ton, eight-engine strategic bomber. Bristol’s bomber design seemed a natural starting place from which to begin developing the airliner. Drawings of the proposed bomber indicate it would have looked a bit like the Convair B-36, with sharply swept wings that incorporated buried engines driving pusher propellers. Unlike the B-36, the Bristol bomber would have had eight engines, with pairs of power plants coupled together to drive contrarotating propellers. Although the engines’ direction was to be reversed to a tractor confguration on the airliner, the idea of using coupled engines

The Brabazon underwent two years of ground testing before it ever took to the skies.

to drive contrarotating props was retained. Bristol was contracted to build two prototypes of what it called the Type 167, with an option for 10 production models. Led by Leslie G. Frise, the design team included some of Britain’s brightest and most innovative minds. They were able to begin actual construction in October 1945, shortly after V-J Day, which was just as well, because it was to take them nearly four years to complete the frst prototype. The Brabazon’s size was truly unprecedented. Fully loaded, it weighed 130 tons. The fuselage was 177 feet long, and its 230foot wingspan was 35 feet longer than that of a Boeing 747. The engineering that went into the prototype was equally impressive. The cabin was fully pressurized and airconditioned. All of the fight controls were hydraulically powered. To save as much weight as possible on the huge airliner, its airframe was covered with a stressed skin fabricated from light-alloy metal sheets of different, nonstandard gauges.

The most visually striking engineering feature was the power system. Eight 2,650hp Bristol Centaurus air-cooled radial engines were embedded in the wings. Each coupled pair of engines drove contrarotating propellers mounted on the end of a slim nacelle containing only the propellers’ drive shafts. The propeller pitch could be reversed to aid in slowing the airplane down after landing. The arrangement gave the visual impression of an impossibly large aircraft powered by four impossibly small engines. Even during the early stages of development the Bristol team recognized that the 21,200 hp provided by eight piston engines would be little more than adequate for an aircraft this size. The frst prototype had to be built that way because the turboprop engines the designers really wanted were not yet available. The second prototype was to be ftted with eight newly developed Bristol Proteus turboprops, in coupled pairs similar to the frst prototype’s arrangement. The Proteus would develop 4,400

weider history group archive airbus, filton

Spectators marvel as the giant makes a fight at the Farnborough airshow in 1950.

Each Bristol Centaurus engine was coupled to a propeller gearbox at a 32-degree angle.

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passengers, and equally unsurprising that airlines of the late 1940s believed it would never be cost effective. Air travel had changed since the 1930s. The airlines no longer saw their planes as fying ocean liners. The cost of air travel was falling, and airliners were being transformed into aerial buses. Simply being able to fy across the ocean was no longer suffcient; airliners now had to be able to accomplish that feat while carrying enough passengers to earn a proft. Although the Brabazon couldn’t do that, the Americans had developed several airliners that could, including the Douglas DC-6, Lockheed Constellation and Boeing Stratocruiser. Signifcantly, BOAC took delivery of its frst Stratocruiser only a month after the Brabazon’s maiden fight. The Brabazon performed many additional test and demonstration fights during the next 2½ years, but attracted no interest from the airlines. It was fnally grounded in 1952 and eventually scrapped. The second prototype, ftted with the turboprop engines that were expected to boost its performance by 50 mph, was never completed. While many in Britain considered the money spent on the Brabazon wasted, the effort Bristol expended on it was not. The facilities constructed at Filton were put to use in developing the Bristol Britannia, a successful airliner far better suited to the air transport conditions of the day. Powered by four of the Proteus turboprops developed for the Brabazon, the Britannia weighed almost 40 percent less than its enormous predecessor, yet could transport the same number of passengers across the Atlantic at a cruising speed more than 100 mph faster. Bristol delivered 85 Britannias, not counting another 72 built under license in Canada. Although the most conspicuous aircraft derived from the Brabazon Committee had proved to be misconceived, not all its recommendations turned out badly. The committee’s work led to the development of several successful transports, including the de Havilland Dove, the Vickers Viscount and the frst production jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet. As for the Brabazon itself, many historians still insist its main problem was not that it was a white elephant but that, as the predecessor of the modern jumbo jet, it was simply 20 years ahead of its time. J

The navigator’s and fight engineer’s stations.

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hp—66 percent more than the Centaurus. Simply getting the Brabazon built and off the ground entailed draconian measures. The gargantuan airliner would be assembled in a building covering eight acres. An entire village, which had survived the worst that Luftwaffe bombers could dish out in the war, was demolished and its inhabitants relocated to accommodate the 8,000-footlong runway the designers thought the Brabazon would require to take off. Although it was completed in 1947, such was the Brabazon’s unprecedented nature that nearly two years of ground tests were deemed necessary before it was fnally cleared to take wing. In the meantime, many skeptics insisted it was too big ever to get off the ground, while critics complained about the £12 million spent to build it. The frst fight fnally occurred on September 4, 1949, witnessed by some 10,000 spectators, including more than 250 reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen, radio commentators and even television broadcasters. As the giant rose into the air, using only a quarter of the distance of the enormous runway that had been built for it, test pilot Arthur J. “Bill” Pegg was heard to exclaim, “Good God, it works!” The Brabazon had a top speed of 300 mph, but at its cruising speed of 250 mph it could fy 5,500 miles. Rate of climb was 750 feet per minute at a maximum takeoff weight of 290,000 pounds, and service ceiling was 25,000 feet. It could carry 100 passengers and a crew of at least six. Despite the fact that the Brabazon had proven itself in the air, it failed to win favor with the airlines—even Britain’s national airline, BOAC. The problem wasn’t that it didn’t fy well, it was simply that the basic premise upon which the design had been based was outdated. The Brabazon’s design grew out of the prewar conception of air travel as a luxury reserved for the wealthy. Passenger accommodations within its fuselage were laid out on a scale far beyond even what we think of today as “frst class.” Passengers were seated in private cabins that could be converted into sleeping berths. The plane boasted a bar, smoking lounge, dining area and even a 32-seat cinema. The Brabazon harked back to the days of air travel on Graf Zeppelin and the fying boats of Imperial Airways. Small wonder such a large airplane could accommodate only 100

Passengers could relax in the lounge, shown here, or take in a flm in the 32-seat cinema.

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 15

AVIATORS

By Dan Heaton

Gunfre Over the Rio Grande

While searching for Pancho Villa, Byron Jones became the frst U.S. military pilot to fy a combat mission

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By 1915, 1st Lt. Byron Q. Jones was known as the 1st Aero Squadron’s daredevil flier.

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eing kicked out of West Point for hazing in 1908 may have been the best thing that ever happened to Byron Q. Jones. Far from sending Jones into a tailspin, that initial setback inspired him to work harder and eventually overcome many of the serious challenges facing America’s early military aviators. A half-dozen or so years after he left the academy in disgrace, Jones—back in a U.S. Army uniform and piloting a biplane trainer—would earn his place in military aviation history. Six months after being dismissed from West Point, Jones and several others were reinstated by direct order of President Theodore Roosevelt. Jones eventually graduated as a member of the Class of 1912. After spending a year or so in the cavalry, he joined the Army’s 1st Aero Squadron. In 1915 Jones earned a reputation as a daredevil in the air, setting fight duration records and becoming the frst Army pilot to execute a loop as well as to intentionally enter a stall and a spin—and recover from both. In recognition of his accomplishments, he was awarded the 1915 MacKay Trophy. He appeared regularly in Flying Magazine, Boys’ Life and other periodicals of the day, profled in articles extolling his stunting skills. While operating from a dusty cavalry training feld in Texas later that same year, Jones made the most noteworthy fight of his career: Flying with observer Lieutenant Thomas D. Milling on April 20, 1915, 1st Lt. Jones few the frst-ever combat sortie by a U.S. Army pilot. More important, he lived to fy another day. Jones and the 1st Aero had been sent to Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, in response to growing tensions with forces loyal to Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. At the time, the squadron was far from an effective fghting force. According

Pancho Villa (to right of cannon) poses in a uniform supplied by Mutual Films in 1914.

to one source, due to the fragility of the aircraft, only about 50 percent of planned sorties could actually be launched. Pilots who did make it off the ground faced daunting odds, as crashes were common. After arriving at Fort Brown on April 17

and assembling their Curtiss JN-2s, the airmen commandeered the west end of the fort’s cavalry feld, then sent word to Maj. Gen. Frederick Funston that they were ready for duty. Funston, who had won accolades for his command of Army forces

library of congress u.s. air force

Lieutenant Carleton Chapman prepares for a recon fight in Mexico in a Curtiss JN-3.

Jones few a biplane similar to this Martin TT on what turned into a combat mission.

in San Francisco after the massive 1906 earthquake, was then in charge of all U.S. troops along the southern border. He ordered his fiers to perform reconnaissance along the Rio Grande and discover the whereabouts of Villa’s forces. On the morning of April 20, Jones made the frst such fight from Fort Brown, returning to base a short time later with nothing to report. He was sent up again that afternoon, this time joined by Milling, feld commander of the aero detachment, in a Martin T biplane. For this second fight Milling carried a map created by Funston’s intelligence team, indicating where Villa’s men might have dug trenches around the Mexican city of Matamoros, just across the meandering Rio Grande from Brownsville. With Jones manning the controls, Milling would spend his time aloft comparing those drawings with what he could see from the air. About 15 minutes into the fight, how-

ever, their airplane drew the attention of Villa’s forces, who opened fre on them with at least one machine gun as well as small arms. Jones, the experienced stuntman, maintained his composure even after the plane was hit. He opened the throttle and nosed up, climbing to 2,600 feet to avoid further fre. Maneuvering away from the river, he managed to return safely to Fort Brown. Jones’ Army biography summarized his accomplishment this way: “He was the frst American pilot fred upon, fying over the river at Brownsville, Texas, by Mexicans using machine guns on the Mexican side of the river.” A state historical marker would later be installed at Fort Brown to commemorate the encounter. Shortly after that, the 1st Aero was sent back to San Diego for additional training. Jones would miss the 1916 expedition into Mexico led by Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing; instead the Army sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to conduct

advanced study in aeronautics. As the United States entered World War I, the Army sought to maximize the value of Jones’ training and experience. In 1917 he was named the frst commander of a new pilot training facility at Selfridge Field, Mich. “This will be a strict military school,” then-Captain Jones said in an interview for Aviation Journal in the summer of 1917, soon after training began. “Regular Army offcers will be in charge and our greatest desire will be to train the students as quickly as possible and at the same time to instill strict military discipline into them....Our standard is high at present and we can afford to keep it high as we can get all the young men we want.” Jones went on to serve as chief of training for the Air Service in Europe during the war. He later became a test pilot of sorts at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio. During the airmail fasco of 1934-35 (see related story, P. 48), Jones led the Army’s efforts in the New York region. He remained in the Air Service through the late 1930s, when he transferred back to the cavalry. As World War II began, Jones—now assigned to a desk job in Washington, D.C.—fled paperwork with the U.S. Patent Offce for a new Army project associated with ground warfare rather than fying. Since he had fled the patent request for a “Military Vehicle Body,” he is technically listed as the inventor of what is arguably the war’s most important vehicle: the jeep. During WWII’s second half, Jones was assigned to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacifc. Thanks to his experience as an air service offcer in the Philippines in the 1920s, Jones often participated in recon fights for MacArthur while the commander was planning his famous return to the Philippine islands. Jones retired from active duty due to a heart ailment in 1944. He and his wife, Evelyn (a great-granddaughter of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame), called Washington, D.C., home late in life. Colonel Byron Q. Jones died in 1959. At his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, all 10 of Jones’ pallbearers were members of the West Point Class of 1912, including nine generals, two of whom had achieved four-star rank. It was a ftting fnal chapter for an offcer who had long served in the very best tradition of the academy. J MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 17

RESTORED

By Jan Forsgren

Baby Comes Back After an emergency landing in Sweden, a B-17G became a bargaining chip for hundreds of American internees

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uring World War II, 143 U.S. Army Air Forces aircraft made unscheduled arrivals in neutral Sweden, 69 of them B-17 Flying Fortresses. Ten of the bombers were handed over to the Swedish government, slated for conversion into 14-seat airliners for use on the SwedenScotland route. In return, hundreds of interned USAAF personnel were repatriated. The Fortresses were designated F-17s in Swedish service, with the F honoring Felix Hardison, the U.S. air attaché who had greatly assisted in the exchange. The frst F-17 entered service with Swedish Intercontinental Airlines in early October 1944, and the last was withdrawn on August 7, 1947. Through a fortuitous series of circumstances, one of those converted bombers survives today, now restored to its original confguration. B-17G-35-BO, serial no. 42-32076, was one of 4,035 B-17Gs built by Boeing in Seattle, Wash. After delivery to the USAAF on January 24, 1944, the new Fortress was ferried across the Atlantic, arriving at Burtonwood on March 2. Subsequently assigned to the 401st Bomb Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force, at Bassingbourn, it was one of the frst 50 Fortresses sent to Great Britain in bare metal fnish rather than camoufage. The B-17G was assigned to Lieutenant Paul C. McDuffee, whose crew chief, Tech. Sgt. Hank Cordes, named it after a popular Andrews Sisters song, “Shoo Shoo Baby.” The new bomber’s frst mission, against Frankfurt, came on March 24, 1944. McDuffee and his crew went on to fy 20 missions in Shoo Shoo Baby, including two raids on Berlin. Arguably their most interesting sortie took place on April 9, when Gdynia on the Baltic coast in Poland was the assigned target. The 91st Bomb Group war diary entry for that mission reads “9-444. Gdynia—recalled,” with a cryptic addi-

Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby takes wing before being displayed at the U.S. Air Force Museum.

tion: “1 A/C Marienburg, Completed.” The story behind this terse entry is remarkable. McDuffee and his crew took off from Bassingbourn in miserable weather. Entering a holding pattern, the lieutenant spotted a formation of Forts from another bomb group, though he couldn’t see any other 91st B-17s. “We’d found a home,” McDuffee recalled, “and we weren’t about to be dispossessed!” The Forts were heading northeast, toward the Baltic Sea, but their target was not Gdynia. South of Sweden they turned toward the German coastline. McDuffee recounted: “When we approached the coast the navigator immediately picked up Gdynia and Danzig, which obviously were not the targets, and we changed to a course of 190 degrees. About that time we hit a terrifc fak barrage and hundreds of fghters. We opened the bomb bay doors and headed for the target when the others did, though we really didn’t know what it was.” Having bombed a target at Marienburg, the crew encountered an unusual problem.

“A shell burst ahead and above us,” McDuffee said, “emitting what appeared to be a big puff of brown smoke. Immediately, another burst just above us, and the whole plane was covered with what looked to be brown tobacco juice. The windows and windshields were completely covered, and the wipers only made it worse. The only way we could see to fy for the rest of the trip was to slide back the windows a bit and sort of stick one eye out.” Just after McDuffee landed at Bassingbourn, having been airborne for 12 hours and 55 minutes, his engines stopped dead due to fuel exhaustion. When he asked how many other Forts had made it back, the response was, “Nobody, because nobody else left!” Due to a malfunctioning radio, Shoo Shoo Baby hadn’t received the recall message. McDuffee’s last mission in Shoo Shoo Baby took place on May 24. Command then passed to Lieutenant Robert J. Guenther, formerly McDuffee’s copilot. It appears that the third “Shoo” was added to the bomber’s name at this juncture. Guenther’s

forced landing collection u.s. air force

The B-17G soon after its arrival in Sweden.

national museum of the usaf/brett stolle

The Fortress later became a Danish airliner.

In 1968, the aircraft was an abandoned shell.

u.s. air force

former bomber was sold the next year to the French Institut Géographique National (IGN). It was issued the civil registration F-BGSH in January 1956, and again rebuilt. This time the nose section was modifed and two cameras were installed in the belly for aerial survey fights. On its last fight, on July 15, 1961, the front fuselage was damaged in a ground collision, after which the venerable Fortress was simply pushed to the side of the airfeld at Creil and left there. F-BGSH had fown a total of 3,364 hours. In 1968 Australian aviation historian Steve Birdsall researched F-BGSH’s provenance and notifed the U.S. Air Force Museum of its unusual history. Unlike most surviving Fortresses, it had been fown operationally in WWII. The French would eventually donate the airplane to the USAF. Disassembled, it was trucked to Frankfurt in 1972, then shipped to the U.S. With no plans to restore the bomber to fying condition, its main wing spars were cut up to ease transport. As the museum had limited funding, the B-17 remained stored in 27 crates. In 1977 Tech. Sgt. Michael Leister of the 512th Organizational Maintenance Squadron at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware contacted the USAF Museum about the possibility of restoring one of their aircraft, with work to be carried out by Air Force Reserve volunteers. Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby was chosen for the project, and the dismantled B-17 was trucked to Dover in July 1978. On hand to receive the crated Fortress was former pilot Paul McDuffee and Stanley T. Wray, one-time commander of the 91st Bomb Group. It was an emotional moment for McDuffee, who said, “I’ve just got to go over and kiss her”—then did just that. The 512th Antique Aircraft Restoration Group was formed to oversee the project. Work continued for a decade to return the bomber to B-17G confguration and fightworthy status. In the end, instead of retaining its original natural metal fnish, Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby was painted olive drab. The rebuilt Fortress was fown to Dayton on October 14, 1988. Now that the B-17G has been on display at the Air Force Museum for 25 years, plans call for it to be moved to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center. In exchange, NASM’s B-17D Swoose was transferred in 2008 to Dayton, where it is currently being restored for display. J

Pilot and copilot controls in the rebuilt plane.

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frst mission as aircraft commander came on May 27. Two days later, he and his crew participated in a raid on an aircraft factory at Posen, Poland. The navigator, 2nd Lt. J.M. Lowdermilk, recalled: “[I] always got to the plane late, as the rest of the crew was ready to go, and I remember that as I walked up to the plane Bob [Guenther] asked me if I knew the way to Sweden because we might run out of gas. I stated that I did and that I had the course charted. This was all in jest, but I have actually wondered what would have happened had this been overheard by the ground crew, since actually we did go to Sweden.” As they neared the target, the bomber’s no. 4 engine began smoking, so it was shut down. Further trouble cropped up over the target, when another engine was damaged by fak. Knowing Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby was a sitting duck, the crew decided to head for Sweden. “As we approached the coastline,” said Lowdermilk, “Bob was interested in knowing whether or not it was Sweden. I confdently stated that it was, but after the fak started coming up as we got over land, I wasn’t so sure. All of it was low, and I believe the Swedes were just telling us ‘Don’t try anything.’ Just before we reached land we lost the third engine, and we were losing altitude fast. A Swedish fghter came up and led us to Malmö, where a B-24, also in trouble, landed just ahead of us.” Guenther touched down at Bulltofta airfeld, outside Malmö. Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby’s crew was repatriated in late October, but the aircraft remained in Swedish hands. Following diplomatic wrangling, a deal was struck in which hundreds of interned USAAF aircrewmen were repatriated in return for 10 B-17s, including three spare recovery airframes. Saab converted seven of the Forts at Linköping. All military equipment was removed, two passenger cabins (seating six and eight) were installed and the bomb bay was converted into a cargo compartment, complete with mechanical lift. In October 1945, the last two Fortresses were transferred to the Danish airline DDL. One of them, the converted Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby, was subsequently registered as OYDFA, and remained in DDL service until early 1948. On April 1, 1948, it was sold to the Danish army air corps, which used the F-17 for aerial survey duties over Greenland. Withdrawn from service in 1954, the

The Fortress’ refurbished radio compartment.

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 19

Take PaTTon wiTh you, wherever you go! on your TableT and Phone Today

ouT of PrinT! available in digiTal only!

Digital editions of Patton: In His Own Words are available at: historynet.com/Patton-Special

LETTER FROM AVIATION HISTORY

By Carl von Wodtke

Miracle of Saint-Nazaire

PHOTOS: WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

Like many young men of his generation, Alan Magee enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At 5 foot 6 inches, he was judged the perfect size to man the cramped ball turret of a B-17 Flying Fortress. Assigned to the 360th Squadron, 303rd Bombardment Group, Magee joined the crew of the B-17F Snap! Crackle! Pop!, which had been flown to England and named by Captain Jacob Fredericks, a former employee of Kellogg Co., maker of Rice Krispies. Magee’s seventh mission, on January 3, 1944, targeted the German U-boat base at Saint-Nazaire, France—known to American airmen as “Flak City” for its formidable anti-aircraft defenses. Snap! Crackle! Pop! was one of 85 B-17s, including the celebrated Memphis Belle, sent on the raid. As it approached the target, Magee’s Fortress took a flak hit, seriously wounding him. Then a Focke-Wulf Fw-190 shot off a portion of Above: Staff Sergeant Alan Magee demonstrates the cramped confines the bomber’s right wing, sending the Fort into a spin. of a B-17 ball turret. Below: After his four-mile fall to earth, the nose “The last thing I remember was that I was at 20-some art from Magee’s Flying Fortress was recovered by the Germans. thousand feet trying to get out of a burning plane,” recalled Magee. The ball turret gunner either jumped or was flung from the spinning B-17. He wasn’t wearing a parachute. Rendered unconscious during his four-mile terminal-velocity free fall, Magee plunged through the glass ceiling of Saint-Nazaire’s train station. Miraculously, when the Germans found him he was still alive, albeit with severe injuries including several broken bones, 28 shrapnel wounds and a nearly severed right arm. Taken to a field hospital at the nearby Hermitage Hotel, he was treated by a German doctor, who told him, “We are enemies, but I am first a doctor and I will do my best to save your arm.” Magee made a full recovery after 2½ months of hospitalization, spent the rest of the war in a POW camp and was liberated in May 1945. He credited the many layers of clothing he was wearing with having helped save his life, and also evoked a higher power: “I don’t know how I got there, but here I am, thanks to God.” Some dubbed the incident the “Miracle of Saint-Nazaire.” Others suggested a fortuitous bomb explosion had somehow cushioned his landing, and TV’s Mythbusters even tested that theory, concluding such a blast would have done more harm than good. After the war Magee earned his pilot’s license and worked for the airline industry in a variety of roles. In 1995 he returned to Saint-Nazaire to attend the dedication of a memorial to his seven fellow crewmen killed in the crash of Snap! Crackle! Pop! (two other crewmen had escaped by parachute and been taken prisoner). A piece of the bomber showing its distinctive nose art, recovered by the Germans, now resides in a Saint-Nazaire museum. Magee’s “miracle” is one of many such tales populating aviation history. In this issue, Stephan Wilkinson deftly covers 10 more in “Amazing But True Stories” (P. 30). Complementing Wilkinson’s engaging prose are the humorous illustrations of long-time Weider History Group contributing artist Mike Caplanis, which lend a lighthearted touch to an admittedly serious subject. We hope you enjoy our amazing aviation story picks, and look forward to hearing about your own personal favorites. J

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 21

Why The

Celebrated as one of the Pacifc War’s best fghters,

Flunked in europe

T

Lightning earned a less-thanenviable reputation in European air combat By Robert F. Dorr

robert f. dorr

he American fghter pilot spotted two indistinct shapes cut­ ting diagonally across a road just slightly above and in front of him. They were blemishes in motion. Twelve o’clock high, he thought. He rechecked his armament switches, rammed his throttles to full power and went down low, as low as he dared, hug­ ging the treetops. The afternoon shadow of his P­38 Lightning raced across French hedgerows and felds as the pilot sought to identify the other two aircraft. He wanted them to be Focke­Wulf Fw­190s, falling nicely into the crosshairs of his nose­mounted 20mm cannon and four .50­cali­ ber machine guns. Captain Robin Olds kicked left rudder, slid his pipper across the nearest plane’s left wing and, in an instant of epiphany, saw the Iron Cross painted on the 22 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

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p-38

Lockheed’s

rear fuselage. Until that instant, he hadn’t been certain the planes were German. Olds shot down one of the Fw­190s moments later, then followed the second into a violent left break, fred and watched the pilot bail out. It was August 14, 1944, and Olds had just used his P­38 Lightning to rack up the frst two of his eventual 13 World War II aerial victories. “I loved the P­38 but I got those kills in spite of the airplane, not because of it,” Olds recalled. “The fact is, the P­38 Lightning was too much airplane for a new kid and a full­time job for even a mature and experienced fghter pilot. Our enemies had diff­ culty defeating the P­38 but, as much as we gloried in it, we were defeating ourselves with this airplane.” It was, Olds hastened to add, “the most beautiful plane of our –robin olds generation.” And it fought well

“i loved the p-38 but i got those kills in spite of the airplane, not because of it.”

A restored P-38J wears the markings of the 80th Fighter Group, which used the Lightning with stunning success over New Guinea. It was a different story for P-38s operating in Europe.

in the Mediterranean and the Pacifc. So what happened in north­ ern Europe, and how could things have gone so wrong?

A

national archives

survey of Stateside training bases in 1941 showed that 87 percent of prospective pilots requested to be assigned to the big, sleek, twin­engine Lockheed Lightning. “We were in awe of the P­38,” said future ace Jack Ilfrey. “It looked like a beautiful monster.” “If you were a boy in America, you wanted to fy it,” said another future ace, Winton “Bones” Marshall. “If you played with Dinky metal toys and balsa wood airplane models, you wanted to fy it.” On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the P­38 captured the imagination of young Americans like no other fghter. Eighth Air Force commander Lt. Gen. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle would later

call the P­38 “the sweetest­fying plane in the sky.” With tricycle gear, twin booms and a centerline fuselage pod brimming with guns, the P­38 was powered by two 1,600­hp Allison V­1710­111/113 liquid­cooled engines driving three­ bladed, 9­foot Curtiss Electric propellers. Although a fully loaded Lightning weighed more than 10 tons—nearly twice as much as a P­51 Mustang—a skilled pilot could fing the P­38 around like a lightweight. The problem was that while American pilots were gen­ erally well trained, they weren’t well trained for a complex twin­ engine fghter. Struggling to keep the air campaign over Europe alive in the face of disastrous bomber losses, the U.S. Army Air Forces rushed two P­38 combat groups to England. On October 15, 1943, the 55th Fighter Group –Jack ilfrey became the frst to conduct

“We were in awe of the p-38. it looked like a beautiful monster.”

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The frst Lightning to see combat, the P-38E scored the twin-boom fghter’s initial victories over the Aleutians and Iceland in 1942.

popperfoto/getty images

planet news archive/getty images

valves and fouled plugs, while their intercoolers often ruptured under sustained high boost and turbocharger regulators froze, sometimes causing catastrophic failures. Arrival of the newer P­38J to fll in behind the P­38H was sup­ posed to help, but did not help enough. The J model’s enlarged radiators were trouble­prone. Improperly blended British fuel exacerbated the problems: Anti­knock lead compounds literally seethed out and became separated in the Allison’s induction system at extreme low temperatures. This could cause detonation and rapid engine failure, especially at the high power settings demanded for combat. The P­38’s General Electric turbo­supercharger sometimes got

operations. The Lightning men mixed it up with Me­109s and Fw­190s on November 6, and racked up their frst aerial victories. “We were arrayed against the Luftwaffe and they were facing us head­on,” one of the pilots said, “and we were not winning.” The P­38 performed usefully but suffered from a number of problems. Its Allison engines consistently threw rods, swallowed

An armorer loads .50-caliber ammunition in England in 1942.

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The P-38 cockpit was like nothing fghter pilots had seen before.

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stuck in over-boosted or under-boosted mode. This occurred mainly when the fghter was fown in the freezing cold at altitudes approaching 30,000 feet, which was the standard situation in the European air war. Another diffculty was that early P-38 versions had only one generator, and losing the associated engine meant the pilot had to rely on battery power. In an article on ausairpower.net, Carlo Kopp noted that in their early days in the European theater, “Many of the P-38s assigned to escort missions were forced to abort and return to base. Most of the aborts were related to engines coming apart in fight....[due to] intercoolers that chilled the fuel/air mixture too much. Radiators that lowered engine temps below normal operating minimums. Oil coolers that could congeal the oil to sludge. These problems could have been fxed at the squadron level. Yet, they were not.” Eighth Air Force historian Roger Freeman described how bravery plus the P-38 was not enough during a mission on November 13, 1943, “an unlucky day for the 55th. In typical English November weather, damp and overcast, forty-eight P-38s set out to escort bombers on the target leg of a mission to Bremen; one turned back before the enemy coast was crossed and two more aborted later. At 26,000 feet over Germany, pilots shivered in bitterly cold cockpits, fying conditions were unusually bad, and the probability of mechanical troubles at that temperature did not In addition to the yoke-type wheel, P-38 pilots had to learn how to handle the complex help. Again outnumbered, the 55th was controls of an advanced twin-engine plane, with many switches in hard-to-reach spots. heavily engaged near the target as it strove to defend the bombers, for which it paid dearly. Seven P-38s fell, ajor General William Kepner, the fery commanding genfve to enemy fghters and the others to unknown causes.” Another eral of VIII Fighter Command, wondered, as so many 16 Lightnings limped home with battle damage. others did, why the P-38 wasn’t producing the results Things got better. The arrival of the improved P-38J-25 and everyone wanted, and what to do about it. Asked to proP-38L models, modifed on the production line based on lessons vide a written report, 20th Fighter Group commander Colonel Harlearned in Europe, helped, but problems remained. Lightning pilot old J. Rau did so reluctantly and only because he was ordered to. 2nd Lt. Jim Kunkle of the 370th Fighter Group remembered: “The “After fying the P-38 for a little over one hundred hours on critical problem with us was we didn’t have much heat in the cock- combat missions it is my belief that the airplane, as it stands now, is pit. On high altitude missions it was very cold. And we didn’t have too complicated for the ‘average’ pilot,” wrote Rau. “I want to put the engine in front of us to help keep us warm. Bomber guys had strong emphasis on the word ‘average,’ taking full consideration those heated blue union suits that they wore but we tried heated just how little combat training our pilots have before going on clothing and it didn’t work for us.” operational status.” The only source of heat in the cockpit was warm air ducted from Rau wrote that he was being asked to put kids fresh from fight the engines, and it was little help. Lightning pilots suffered terribly. school into P-38 cockpits and it wasn’t working. He asked his boss “Their hands and feet became numb with cold and in some in- to imagine “a pilot fresh out of fying school with about a total of stances frost-bitten; not infrequently a pilot was so weakened by twenty-fve hours in a P-38, starting out on a combat mission.” conditions that he had to be assisted out of the cockpit upon re- Rau’s young pilot was on “auto lean and running on external tanks. turn,” wrote Freeman. His gun heater is off to relieve the load on his generator, which

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Colonel Harold J. Rau, commander of the 20th Fighter Group, poses with his ground staff, his dog Honey and his P-38J.

follow this order you can ruin the engine.” Rau added that in his own limited experience, his P­38 group had lost at least four pilots who, when bounced, took no evasive action. “The logical assump­

warren m. bodie collection

frequently gives out (under sustained heavy load). His sight is off to save burning out the bulb. His combat switch may or may not be on.” So, fying along in this condition, wrote Rau, the kid suddenly gets bounced by German fghters. Now he wonders what to do next. “He must turn, he must increase power and get rid of those external tanks and get on his main [fuel tank],” Rau wrote. “So, he reaches down and turns two stiff, diffcult gas switches (valves) to main, turns on his drop tank switches, presses his release button, puts the mixture to auto rich (two separate and clumsy opera­ tions), increases his RPM, increases his manifold pressure, turns on his gun heater switch (which he must feel for and cannot possibly see), turns on his combat switch and he is ready to fght.” To future generations this would be called multi­tasking, and it was not what you wanted to be doing when Luftwaffe fghters were pouring down on you. “At this point, he has probably been shot down,” Rau noted, “or he has done one of several things wrong. Most common error is to push the throttles wide open before increasing RPM. This causes detonation and subsequent engine failure. Or, he forgets to switch back to auto rich, and gets excessive cylinder head temperature with subsequent engine failure.” Another P­38 pilot described the multi­tasking challenge this way: “When you reduce power you must pull back the throttle (manifold pressure) frst, then the prop RPM, and then the mix­ ture. To increase power you must frst put the mixture rich, then increase prop RPM, then increase manifold pressure. If you don’t

A P-38D, the frst Lightning model to be combat rated, shows off its clean lines and unmistakable silhouette in 1942.

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A P-38J fies behind the F-5 photoreconnaissance variant, which experienced greater success over Europe than the fghter version.

photos: warren m. bodie collection

Rau also pointed to the need “to simplify the gas switching sys­ tion is that they were so busy in the cockpit trying to get organized tem in this airplane. The switches [valve selector handles] are all in that they were shot down before they could get going,” he wrote. Rau described part of the solution: “It is standard procedure for awkward positions and extremely hard to turn. The toggle switches the group leader to call, fve minutes before [rendezvous with the for outboard tanks are almost impossible to operate with gloves bombers being escorted,] and tell all pilots to ‘prepare for trouble.’ on.” That last issue was no small thing given the need to wear gloves This is the signal for everyone to get into auto rich, turn drop tank in the Lightning’s frigid cockpit. Critics and champions of the P­38 alike often failed to remark on switches on, gun heaters on, combat and sight switches on and to increase RPM and manifold pressure to maximum cruise. This the obvious—that it was a multi­engine aircraft while most fghters procedure, however, will not help the pilot who is bounced on the way in and who is trying to conserve his gasoline and equipment for the escort job ahead.” During advisory visits to his fghter group, Lockheed and Allison representatives asked for sugges­ tions. Rau wrote that their number­ one request was a unit power control, incorporating an automatic mani­ fold pressure regulator, which would control power, RPM and mixture by use of a single lever. He may not have known P­51 pilots could per­ form all these functions with one hand—never possible in the P­38, The 322-B Lightning I, intended for export to Britain, was equipped with Allison F-series even in later versions. engines without superchargers. Rejected by the British, it was used as an American trainer. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 27

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were single­engine. Long after the war, for­ mer 1st Lt. Arthur W. Heiden wrote: “The quality of multi­engine training during World War II bordered on the ridiculous. I am convinced that with training methods now in use we could take most of civilian private pilots who might be about to fy the Aztec or Cessna 310, and in ten hours, have a more confdent pilot than the ones who few off to war in the P­38. A P­38 pilot usually got his training in two ways. The frst way, of course, was twin­engine advanced training in Curtiss AT­9s, which had the unhappy feature of having propel­ lers you couldn’t feather. After sixty hours of this, the student received ten hours of AT­6 gunnery, although he might get his gunnery training in the AT­9, since AT­6s were in short supply.” Frank E. Birtciel, who few 72 combat missions in P­38s and 49 in P­51s, said that near the end of training in the AT­9, the usual practice was to give a student pilot a “piggyback” ride in a P­38 with a second seat, and then check him out in the RP­322, a version of the fghter with simpler sys­ tems. Birtciel said procedures were so lax that a training instructor simply appeared amid a group of students one day and asked, “Anyone want to fy a ’38?” He raised his hand, expecting to be a backseater, and found a fully operational, single­seat P­38—not an RP­322—waiting for him on the ramp. “The crew chief told me how to start it up and I took off and few it without any instruction,” he said.

An impressive formation of P-38J Lightnings from the 20th Fighter Group, decked out in D-Day invasion stripes, sets forth from England on a daytime mission during 1944.

t the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, with the U.S. daylight bombing campaign still moving in fts and starts, the frst P­51 Mustangs entered service with the 354th Fighter Group, whose airmen never few any other fghter once they reached England. The Mustangs’ arrival in Britain altered every aspect of the Americans’ aerial campaign against Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Whatever Lightning or P­47 Thunderbolt pilots might have said then, or might say today with 70 years of hindsight, the Mustang’s combination of speed and maneuverability was superior to that of any other U.S. fghter, and it had the legs to go deep into enemy territory. A P­51B could carry 400 gallons of fuel, almost as much as the bigger P­47, but the Mustang got 3.3 miles per gallon while the Thunderbolt and Lightning got less than 1.8. The P­51’s lower rate of fuel consumption gave it a combat radius of more than 700 miles, enough to reach any target the bombers could. It was 30­70 mph faster than any German piston­engine fghter until the Fw­190D and had better acceleration, while its maneuverability and climb rate matched or exceeded anything the Luftwaffe could feld. 28 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

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The 55th Fighter Group was the frst to get the new P­51D, trad­ ing in its old P­38s for the bubble­canopy fghters. The change from the torque­less twin­engine P­38 to the single­engine P­51 caused some initial problems, but once the pilots fully adjusted to their new rides, they found that the Mustang gave them an edge in both speed and maneuverability over all Luftwaffe piston­engine fghters at altitudes above 20,000 feet. The P­51’s chief disadvantage in comparison to the P­38 was its vulnerability to enemy fre, par­ ticularly the liquid­cooled Merlin engine, which could be put out of action with a single hit. At those times the former Lightning pilots may have found themselves wishing for a second engine to carry them back to base. P­38 expert Warren M. Bodie wrote that the Lightning should have been converted from Allison to Merlin power, exactly as was done with the P­51. “Neither P­38 pilots, mechanics, facilities or logistics were prepared to operate effciently in one of the bitterest European winters on record [1943­44],” he noted. “No other Allison­powered aircraft ever operated at altitudes of more than 20,000 feet over the Continent for even a half hour.” Bodie was a staunch advocate of the P­38, but in a 1991 interview he acknowl­

tyson rininger/tvr photography

edged that it achieved “mixed results” in combat with the Luftwaffe over north­ ern Europe. Only one fghter group in northern Europe, the 474th, few the Lightning from arrival in Europe until war’s end. As part of the Ninth Air Force, the group few mostly ground­attack missions at relatively low altitudes, and thus avoided most of the concerns associated with air­to­air action higher up. One role in which the P­38 excelled, regardless of where, was photorecon­ naissance. The F­5—its nacelle packed with cameras and its pilot focusing on high­speed missions intended to avoid enemy aircraft, get the pictures and get home—was a great success, whether at high altitude or “dicing” on the deck (see “Eyes of the Army,” September 2010). The P­38 served importantly in every theater of the war, but it truly came into its own in the Pacifc in the hands of pilots such as Majors Richard I. “Dick” Bong and Thomas B. McGuire, Ameri­ ca’s top aces with 40 and 38 victories, respectively. Many of the men in P­38 cockpits fghting Japan started out with far more experience than those who were initially rushed to Europe. They fought in warmer weather and at lower altitudes, and while some of their Japa­ nese adversaries were also seasoned, few were as skilled as the typical Luftwaffe fghter pilot of December 1943. The vaunted Mitsubishi A6M Zero lacked armor and self­sealing fuel tanks and was overrated in some areas, including its fabled maneuverability. While a combat radius of 500 miles was a challenge to the P­38 under condi­ tions in Europe, thanks in part to greater efforts to manage fuel consumption in the Pacific—aided by advice from Charles A. Lindbergh, who visited com­ bat units and taught younger pilots how Glacier Girl, a P-38E rescued from Greenland and restored to airworthy status, fies above to save gas (see “The Lone Eagle’s War,” two of her more advanced sisters—both P-38Js—at the 2010 California Capital Airshow. March 2013)—550 miles was not un­ common. When Major John Mitchell led 16 P­38s to attack and kill Robert F. Dorr is a U.S. Air Force veteran, a retired senior U.S. dipJapan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on April 18, 1943, the mission lomat and the author of 75 books and thousands of magazine articles spanned about 420 miles (see “Death by P­38,” May 2013). about the Air Force. His latest book is Fighting Hitler’s Jets (which is The P­38 Lightning inspired young men, fought a global war and reviewed on P. 61). For additional reading, try: The Lockheed P­38 earned a reputation as one of the greatest fghters of all time. In the Lightning, by Warren M. Bodie; The Mighty Eighth, by Roger A. European Theater of Operations it was somewhat miscast, sorely Freeman; Fighters of the United States Air Force, by Dorr and David misused and severely challenged. But it remained the mount of Donald; and Fighters of the Mighty Eighth, by William N. Hess and preference for many pilots, who loved this airplane like no other. J Thomas G. Ivie. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 29

These 10 aviation tales prove that sometimes truth really is stranger than fction By Stephan Wilkinson Spitfre Ride On February 14, 1945, Leading Aircraftwoman Margaret Horton, an RAF WAAF, was assigned a familiar job: sit on the horizontal stabilizer of a Spitfre to help hold the tail down while it taxied on a windy day. Unfortunately, nobody thought to tell the pilot, Flight Lt. Neill Cox, that she’d be jumping aboard. (Horton later admitted that “the squadron was run in a slap-happy way.”) The normal drill was for the tail-sitter to grab the aircraft’s elevator and waggle it before the pilot turned onto the runway, so he’d know she was hopping off. But this time Cox made a casual gesture out of the cockpit that Margaret took to mean “Hang on, don’t go yet.” Big mistake. As the Spitfre accelerated down the runway, Horton had the good sense to quickly fop across the tail cone, where she was held in place by the vertical fn, her legs to the right and her torso to the left. Another WAAF who’d seen what was happening dashed off to tell a fight sergeant, who ran to the control tower. Cox was ordered to make a quick circuit and land, but wasn’t told why. Between Horton’s death grip on the elevator with her left hand plus the Spitfre’s tail-heaviness, Cox had already fgured that something was amiss, but he couldn’t see as far aft as his airplane’s empennage. Relieved to be back on the ground, Horton announced that after a change of panties and a cigarette, she’d be good to go back 30 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

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to work. She was later fned for losing her uniform beret during the short trip around the pattern.

Crusader Fail On June 21, 1963, Marine Lieutenant Cliff Judkins was tanking from an Air Force Boeing KC-97 over the Pacifc, on his way from California to Hawaii, when the automatic shut-off valve of his F-8 Crusader failed and the internal fuel bladder burst from the pressure of the still-fowing fuel from the tanker. With fames streaming from the big Vought fghter, Judkins tucked in his legs and jerked the canvas face curtain to eject. Nothing happened. He quickly pulled the alternate fring handle between his knees, but still…nothing. Now Judkins’ only choice was an old-fashioned bailout. Nobody had ever tried stepping out of a Crusader, with its vertical stabilizer a tall machete aft of the cockpit, but Judkins trimmed the ship to skid, manually jettisoned the canopy and at 220 knots and 15,000 feet was quickly sucked out of the cockpit. His troubles weren’t over. When he pulled his parachute’s D ILLUSTRATed BY MIKe CAPLANIS

ring, Judkins got a streamer: The little pilot chute deployed and the shroud lines pulled out normally, but the main canopy remained an unopened bundle, wrapped like a moth in a spiderweb by the shrouds. Judkins fell nearly three miles into the Pacifc, the streamer slowing his terminal-velocity plunge by perhaps 10 percent—likely still a good 110 mph straight down. He survived the fall with two severely broken ankles, a fractured pelvis and vertebra, a partially collapsed lung and various lesser injuries. Four years earlier, after Judkins had been in a bad automobile accident, he had had his spleen removed during surgery.

A doctor later told him that if he’d still had his spleen, the fall from the F-8 would have killed him when the impact ruptured it.

Seat Belt Fastened at All Times There weren’t many old BAC One-Elevens still fying in 1990, but one of them, British Airways 5390, was en route from Birmingham to the Spanish island of Malaga on June 10. It was a sunny Sunday, with 81 happy beachgoers aboard, when the entire pilot’s-side windscreen blew out as the One-Eleven climbed through 17,300 feet. The captain, Tim Lancaster, was almost instantly sucked out the opening—he’d removed his shoulder harness after takeoff and loosened his lapstrap—but fortunately the backs of his knees jammed against the top of the windscreen frame while his feet

were caught under the yoke of his control column. Steward Nigel Ogden, who had just entered the cockpit, grabbed Lancaster by the legs while the frst offcer got the airplane under control. Ogden was on the verge of being dragged out as well when a second steward reached the cockpit and secured him with a strap from the captain’s shoulder harness. By this time, Lancaster had slipped sideways from the roof of the cockpit, and his bloodied head was failing against the left side window. The crew assumed that he was already dead. “His eyes were wide open,” Ogden recalled. “I’ll never forget that sight.” Lancaster was actually comatose, his systems shut down as a result of the incredible shock and the excruciating cold of the high-speed slipstream. A second steward eventually had to relieve Ogden, who was frostbitten and losing his grip, and by the time the airplane landed at Southampton, England, Lancaster was being held only by his ankles. He in fact survived with a fractured arm and wrist, and his frst words after being pulled back into the cockpit were “I want to eat.” MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 31

(“Just like a pilot,” Ogden reportedly said.) It was soon determined that an overworked mechanic had used undersized bolts on 84 of the windscreen’s 90 hold-down fttings.

Free Fall On Christmas Eve 1971, a Peruvian Lockheed L188 Electra, LANSA Flight 508 en route from Lima to the small Amazon jungle city of Pucallpa, came apart in a thunderstorm: A lightning strike ignited a fuel tank, and the fre caused the right wing spar to fail. The four-engine turboprop had been cruising at FL210, and the faming pieces fell unseen into a 15-square-kilometer area of the tropical void below. There had been 86 passengers and a crew of six. All but one were killed. That sole survivor was a 17-year-old high school senior, Juliane Koepcke, the daughter of a German zoologist and his wife, a Peruvian ornithologist. Juliane’s mother, sitting next to her, died in the crash of LANSA 508 while Juliane’s father awaited them at Pucallpa. Two things were remarkable about the crash: how Juliane survived it, and how she then saved herself from death in the jungle. Koepcke had her seat belt fastened, and when the airplane came apart, she fell, still strapped into the

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window seat, while her mother and the aisle-seat occupant fell free. Like a maple-seed pod at the end of its winglet, Juliane and the three-seat row helicoptered all the way down and landed in an area of jungle trees interlaced with vines that cushioned her fall. The teenager had broken a collarbone, suffered deep cuts and all but lost her vision, her eyes were so bloodshot and bruised in the fall. Koepcke had spent a good part of her young life with her parents in the backcountry of Peru, and they had taught her survival skills. One lesson was that every rivulet of water fows into a brook, then into a stream, a tributary and eventually into a river. Dressed in a miniskirt and wearing just one sandal, barely able to see, Juliane followed the water. Twelve days later, it led her to Pucallpa. Koepcke’s fall is the subject of a Werner Hertzog documentary, Wings of Hope, which can be viewed on YouTube.

Liberated Liberator A Consolidated C-87, the cargo version of the B-24, took off at 1 a.m. on February 9, 1943, from West Palm Beach, Fla., bound for the Azores en route to North Africa. The crew leveled the Liberator Express at 9,000 feet, but the pilot was barely able to maintain altitude. Worse, the elevator and rudders began to vibrate violently through the control column and rudder pedals. With the airplane only about 90 miles east of Florida, the pilot initiated a return, and the crew lightened their load by tossing out baggage and cargo. By the time they were inbound and descending just 10 miles east of Miami, the C-87 had become so uncontrollable that the pilot ordered the crew and passengers to jump, then followed after turning on the autopilot. Presumably, he didn’t have enough control to turn the airplane seaward rather than leaving it on course toward the heavily populated Florida coast. The Coast Guard and several civilian boats pulled six of the eight jumpers from the water, but two were never seen again. Meanwhile, the C-87, having shed another 1,500 pounds of its load, shrugged its aluminum shoulders and climbed back to altitude, now headed west and under the control of the autopilot; if its tail surfaces were still vibrating, it didn’t seem to bother George. About 4½ hours later, after crossing the Gulf of Mexico, the C-87 had traveled 1,300 miles and reached Zaragoza, Mexico, 25 miles southwest of the U.S. border. For two hours the Liberator Express

carved lazy orbits over the Mexican town and fnally crashed into a nearby mountain.

He’s Out! He’s In! During a dogfght in January 1918, Royal Flying Corps pilot Captain Reginald Makepeace bunted his Bristol F.2B into a steep dive, and the negative Gs tossed his gunner/observer, Captain John H. Hedley, out of his seat. The RFC didn’t issue its airmen parachutes in those days, thinking it would make them less aggressive if they had such an easy out, so Hedley was doomed. Or was he? Hedley fell several hundred feet, but so did the F.2B. Gunner and airplane somehow came together, and Hedley found himself clinging to the fat-topped aft fuselage of the fghter. He managed to crawl back to his pit and went on, apparently nonplussed, to score 11 victories before being shot down and imprisoned two months later. (Makepeace himself had 17 victories scored with his forward-fring gun, so they were literally a deadly duo.) After the war, Hedley became an American, moved to Chicago and at least for a while made a living billing himself as “The Luckiest Man Alive” and giving lectures about his adventure. Had he instead moved to Berlin, he’d have had to share the stage with 1st Lt. Otto Berla, who on May 24, 1917, had been the observer aboard an Albatros C.V when a sudden bout of turbulence bunted the airplane’s nose down and popped an unbelted Berla up and out of his rear seat. He and the airplane briefy formated until a second updraft forced the tail up again just in time to meet the rapidly descending Berla, who punched feet frst through the plywood-skinned turtledeck just aft of his cockpit. Very happy to be back aboard, Berla rode back to base in his new temporary offce.

lence directly behind Aman’s Phantom. Pardo then had Aman drop his tailhook and maneuvered behind and under Aman’s airplane until the hook was snug against the base of Pardo’s windscreen. The slightest lapse in airmanship would, of course, have put the big steel bar straight through the glass and into Pardo’s face. Even though Aman had by now shut down his engines and Pardo was fying on only one with his other engine afre, “Pardo’s Push” got the job done for almost 90 critical miles. Without the help from behind, Aman’s engine-

Pardo’s Push On March 10, 1967, after a bombing run near Hanoi, U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Pardo used his F-4 Phantom to literally push his wingman’s badly damaged F-4 to relative safety over Laos, where both pilots and their backseaters then ejected and were rescued. Captain Earl Aman’s Phantom was holed by anti-aircraft fre, and the damage drained most of his fuel. Knowing that Aman would run dry within minutes, Pardo had him jettison his braking parachute and then tried to put his F-4’s nose into the small tailcone cavity left by the departed chute. No luck: too much turbu-

out glide would have ended well inside North Vietnam. The Air Force wasn’t pleased, however: Pardo had lost not one but two airplanes and was rebuked for his poor sense of economy. Bob Pardo may well have known about the similar maneuver attempted by Captain James Risner over North Korea on September 15, 1952, for it was an honored part of USAF lore. Like Pardo, Risner found himself with a wingman losing fuel through a tank holed by groundfre. Both were fying F-86 Sabres, so Risner told MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 33

1st Lt. Joseph Logan to shut down his engine while Risner maneuvered the nose of his Sabre into Logan’s tailpipe. He tried pushing Logan to a safe runway in South Korea, but ultimately only got him over the sea; jet fuel and hydraulic fuid streaming out of Logan’s engine bay threatened to fame out Risner’s engine, so he had to disengage. Logan bailed out but drowned. Risner survived to become the frst double recipient of the Air Force Cross, as an F-105D pilot and then POW during the Vietnam War. But again, the Air Force chastised him for attempting “a dangerous maneuver.”

Cable Guy Carroll Rex Byrd, cross-trained as both a pilot and a radioman, was a crewman aboard a Grumman JRF-5 Goose on September 21, 1943. The small twin-engine amphibian had just been transferred from the Navy to the Coast Guard and was en route from NAS New York, at Floyd Bennett Field, to CGAS San Francisco. Byrd, 26, never made it to California. A farmer picking tomatoes near Kratzerville, Pa., heard the Goose overhead and looked up just in time to see what he thought was a mailbag falling from the airplane. The “mailbag” was Byrd, who hit the ploughed ground and bounced 8 feet back into the air. The airplane, to the farmer’s amazement, simply continued droning westward. Had Byrd been a suicide jumper? Had he been pushed? Fallen unnoticed through an unlocked door or hatch? The story that eventually came to light was that Byrd had told the pilot he was going to fx an inoperative radio antenna and had pulled himself out of the cabin door onto

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the airplane’s roof to work on the aerial in fight. When he hadn’t returned in 20 minutes, a crewman poked his head out and saw that Byrd was gone. That remains the offcial version, yet it seems strange that the Goose pilot didn’t at least assign a crewman to more closely monitor Byrd’s crazy mission and immediately see that he’d fallen, and that the crew apparently reported the loss rather casually. It took days for a Navy accident investigation team to identify Byrd and fgure out where he’d come from while the Goose continued to California. The Kratzerville farmer later found a yard-long piece of metal in his tomato feld that may or may not have been part of an aircraft antenna. Was Byrd gripping it when it broke off? We’ll never know, and maybe we should chalk this one up to “There’s a war on, we have more important things to worry about.”

Stranger Than Fiction Luftwaffe ace Erich Paczia, the pilot of an out-of-control Me-109, was probably dead when his Messerschmitt’s wing sliced into the fuselage of the B-17F All American over Tunisia on February 1, 1943, but the collision nearly did the job that Paczia’s silent guns couldn’t. The bomber’s left horizontal stabilizer and elevator were sliced off, and the entire empennage was barely held in trail by a few longerons and a narrow strip of aluminum skin. The crew considered their chances—bail out over German-held ground or try to make it back to base—and decided to stay with the ship, knowing that if the tail did come off, their chances of getting out of a gyrating bomber were probably nil. Lieutenant Kendrick Bragg, the pilot, slowed down the Flying Fortress to 140 knots to keep the tail from literally wagging itself off and few as gently as possible back to Biskra, Algeria. After circling for some minutes while the rest of his formation landed, Bragg made a careful approach and touched down normally, though without a tail wheel. An ambulance wheeled up to collect injured crewmen, but Bragg waved it off; not a single person was hurt. All American, undamaged except for the 109’s slash, was mated to the tail of another grounded B-17 and few—slowly and badly, as reports have it—until the airplane was fnally scrapped two years later.

is failing…the turn back toward base has to be made so gently that it takes 70 miles to accomplish…Bragg fies a fnal approach 40 miles long…and, poignantly, the tail sags to the ground just after the crew debarks. None of that is true, but the truth remains stranger than fction.

Air Isn’t Oxygen

Internet accounts of the All American incident are flled with imaginary details. The airplane is described as continuing on its bombing run after the collision…returning to its base in England (a 1,100-mile trip over occupied France), with P-51 escorts joining it over the Channel…the tail gunner heroically remaining at his station because his weight is the only thing stabilizing the tail section…crewmen sacrifcing their parachute harnesses to strap the empennage to the fuselage…two engines are out and a third

An aerial photographer and his assistant on April 1, 1997, climbed to almost 28,000 feet in an unpressurized Cessna 337D Skymaster that had been modifed to carry a through-the-foor camera. They were “on oxygen,” of course, breathing through face masks. The assistant remembers the pilot reaching back to turn on the oxygen tank valve; she felt the fow of cool air into her mask and noted that the indicator in the oxygen line had fipped from red to green, indicating a positive fow. As the Cessna climbed through 20,000 feet, however, she felt dizzy and disoriented, and she closed her eyes—the last thing she remembers about the fight. Air Traffc Control was unable to contact the pilot, though its radar painted the airplane climbing through its assigned altitude— FL250—and reaching 27,700 feet, then descending rapidly to 26,000 before disappearing from the scope about 15 miles west of Pittsburgh, Pa. The Cessna had come apart because of the extreme stresses of an uncontrolled high-speed spiral dive, with a pilot dead of hypoxia at the controls. Through a horrible April Fool’s Day mix-up, the airplane’s portable oxygen tank had been flled with ordinary compressed air, not oxygen—fine for scuba divers, fatal for pilots. Shedding its left outboard wing, tail booms and empennage, the four-seat cabin, a pod about the size of a subcompact car, fell nearly fve miles and ended up in a tree on a golf resort. With the right wing remaining and the cabin and two engines at one end of it, again a maple-seed spiral almost certainly slowed the descent. The woman in the right seat survived with minor cuts and bruises, apparently having been better acclimated than the pilot to fying at Everest altitudes while breathing what was essentially ambient air. J MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 35

When the Soviets successfully tested their frst atomic bomb in August 1949, the U.S. found itself dangerously unprepared to meet the new threat By E.R. Johnson

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o say that the United States was unprepared for the dramatic expansion of Soviet military power during the immediate post–World War II period would be a gross understatement. No one could have realistically predicted that by 1949 the Soviets would acquire the technology to produce atomic bombs and aircraft capable of delivering them to North America (the Tu-4, a copy of the B-29). When the threat became apparent, U.S. Air Force Air Defense

A trio of North American F-86D “Sabre Dogs” demonstrates one U.S. response to the emerging threat of Soviet nuclear weapons, which made headlines in 1949 (below left).

Command (ADC)—responsible for protecting America from air attack—was years away from being ready. A radar warning network across the northern U.S. and southern Canada was in the initial stages of development, but more acute, the only radar-equipped all-weather airplanes in ADC’s inventory were a handful of propellerdriven night fghters, 41 Northrop F-61C Black Widows and 150 North American F-82E/F/G Twin Mustangs. Although the USAF had already made far-reaching plans to equip ADC units with missile-armed supersonic interceptors, these aircraft were not expected to become operational until 36 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

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the mid-1950s—and that was not nearly soon enough. As new turbojet engines became available late in WWII, the U.S. Army Air Forces issued an Advanced Development Objective outlining the requirements for a jet aircraft to replace its existing feet of prop-driven night fghters. The specifcation called for a two-seat, radar-equipped airplane with a top speed of 550 mph, an operational ceiling of 35,000 feet and a combat radius of 600 miles. In early 1946, after reviewing six design proposals, the USAAF narrowed the feld to the Curtiss Model 29A and Northrop Model N-35, and Convair’s unortho-

Above: U.S. Air Force; leFt: (bAckgroUnd) SovFoto/Uig viA getty imAgeS; keyStone/getty imAgeS

dox delta-wing Model 7002 was spun off as a separate experimental project under the designation XF-92. Contracts to proceed with construction of night fghter prototypes were given to Curtiss as the XP-87 and to Northrop as the XP-89, with the expectation that prototypes would be fying within 14 months (mid-1947). Although the two designs were similar in terms of their straight-wing layouts and takeoff weights, they differed substantially: The XP-87 was powered by four Westinghouse J34 engines paired in nacelles on the wings and featured a wide-section fuselage in which the pilot and radar operator were

seated side-by-side, whereas the XP-89 incorporated a slender fuselage, with the crew seated in tandem under a long canopy and two Allison J35 engines housed in sidemounted nacelles below the wings. Both aircraft were designed to eventually be ftted with a nose turret housing four 20mm cannons. In the course of mockup inspections during 1946, Curtiss received the go-ahead to complete its fying prototype, but Northrop was directed by Air Material Command to make numerous design changes before proceeding further. On March 5, 1948, nearly a year behind schedule, the XP-87 prototype was the frst

to fy. In June, most likely as a result of the USAF’s haste to obtain any type of jet interceptor, Curtiss received an order for 57 F-87A production aircraft, plus 30 RF-87A photoreconnaissance versions. Meanwhile, Northrop’s black-painted prototype, now the XF-89, made its frst fight from the Muroc fight test base in California on August 16. In trials carried out between competing prototypes during the fall of 1948, the Air Force concluded that the Curtiss and Douglas entries were both seriously underpowered, while the somewhat faster XF-89 was deemed to have better potential for long-term development. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 37

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Northrop’s F-89J was the frst fghter equipped to carry air-to-air nuclear missiles.

A formation of F-89D Scorpions patrols the skies high above Goose Bay, Labrador.

XF-89 was destroyed during a low-altitude speed run. The cause was found to be a failure of the horizontal tail surfaces induced by tail futter, attributed to engine exhaust gas. The second prototype, redesignated YF-89, was subjected to extensive modifcations before the fight program was allowed to resume. The changes included a longer, more pointed nose to house an AN/APG-33 radar and Hughes E-1 fre-control system, revised intakes and the addition of defector plates behind the engine exhausts to minimize the tail futter problem. Takeoff and climb performance 38 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

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Force between September 1950 and March 1951, but were retained in the test inventory to conduct operational suitability trials. The frst true operational Scorpions, 37 F-89Bs that were delivered between early 1951 and early 1952, differed from the A in having an autopilot and improved fight instrumentation. After initially entering service with the 84th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS) at Hamilton AFB, Calif., the type equipped three more squadrons during 1951 and 1952. Early operations with F-89Bs were marred by frequent engine failures and problems

with the complex Hughes fre-control system. Starting in late 1951, the B models were followed by 164 F-89Cs, featuring improvements to the fuel system, new balance mechanisms on the horizontal stabilizer and a succession of engine upgrades. F-89Cs became operational in early 1952, and went on to equip seven squadrons; however, the entire Scorpion feet was grounded in September 1952 following the loss of six aircraft due to complete wing separations. An investigation revealed that the main attachment brackets had failed when twisting moments were imposed on the wings during high-G maneuvering. Over the next 15 months, all 194 F-89As, Bs and Cs were returned to Northrop in batches for the installation of stronger, machined attachment brackets plus fns added to the tip tanks that counteracted the twisting force. F-89s awaiting modifcations were allowed to resume operations, but with restrictions on speeds and load limits. The most numerous Scorpion production variant, the F-89D, debuted in October 1951 and became fully operational in early 1954. One of the early interceptor concerns facing ADC was adequate frepower plus the ability to fre weapons from greater

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was improved by ftting afterburning J35A-21 engines that increased available power by 25 percent. Eight F-89As incorporating the YF-89 improvements were delivered to the Air

U.S, Air Force

anceling the Curtiss contract in late 1948, the USAF awarded Northrop a letter agreement in January 1949 to tool up for production of 48 F-89As, which was raised to 75 when the offcial production contract was granted in September. In the interval, the movable nose turret was discarded in favor of a fxed armament of six nose-mounted 20mm cannons, and the name Scorpion was offcially adopted. The second prototype, delivered in a natural metal fnish, began testing in November 1949, but the Scorpion program came to an abrupt halt in early 1950 when the frst

A crew loads folding-fn aircraft rockets (FFARs) into the wingtip pod of an F-89.

accommodate three Falcons and 21 FFARs. Divided equally between semi-active radar and infrared homing types, the Mach 2.8 missiles could be fred at targets from four miles. The fnal operational variant, the F-89J, came from 350 F-89Ds converted between November 1956 and February 1958, and was the frst fghter of any type to be equipped with an air-to-air nuclear weapon. Douglas Aircraft had begun development of the unguided MB-1 Genie rocket in 1955. The 822-pound weapon could accelerate to Mach 3.3 and deliver its 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead against targets within a

LocKHeeD F-94

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n the fall of 1948, given the predictable delays associated with the testing and production of the XF-89, USAF offcials looked at the alternative of adapting a jet interceptor from an already proven airframe. The most likely candidate was the Lockheed TF-80C (later T-33) trainer, a stretched, two-seat derivative of the F-80 that had fown in March 1948 and was already entering production. During October the Air Force authorized Lockheed to modify two TF-80Cs under the designation ETF-80C (later YF-94), and in January 1949 awarded a formal contract for procurement of 150 production aircraft as the F-94A. The conversion of the basic airframe to an interceptor confguration, however, was not as straightforward as had frst been believed. In order to compensate for the loss of performance caused by the added weight of armament, radar and fre-control equipment, it was necessary to enlarge the aft fuselage so that the Allison J33-A-33 engine could be ftted with an afterburner. The installation of an AN/APG-33 radar set and Hughes E-1 fre-control system gave the nose its distinctive upturned profle, but left space for only four .50-caliber machine guns—exceptionally light armament for an interceptor. Lacking guns and most operational equipment, the frst ETF-80C few on April 16, 1949, but almost immediately encountered unexpected fameouts during afterburner operations. While engineers from Allison and Lockheed were still working to resolve the problem, news that the Soviet

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ranges and at defection angles that would permit better rates of closure. A new weapon designed specifcally for that purpose, the 2.75-inch (70mm) Mighty Mouse folding-fn aircraft rocket (FFAR), was introduced in 1950. On the F-89D, the tip tanks were replaced by enlarged pods, each containing 308 gallons of fuel in the rear section and 52 FFARs carried in honeycomb tubes in the forward section. The rockets had an effective range of 2,000 yards, and when fred in salvo, could blanket an area the size of a football feld. The fxed guns were removed to make room for an entirely new straight-tapered nose sec-

tion that housed a new Hughes APG-40 radar and E-6 fre-control system, permitting beam attacks of up to 90 degrees of defection. An upgrade to J35-A-35 engines boosted top speed to 635 mph (0.86 Mach) at 10,600 feet. By the time the last of 682 F-89Ds were delivered in March 1956, they equipped 23 ADC squadrons located in the northern U.S., Canada and Alaska. Other proposed versions—the F-89E single-seat escort fghter, the F-89F powered by J47 engines and armed with guided GAR-2 Falcon missiles and the F-89G with a more advanced fire-control system—never progressed beyond the design stage. The addition of a Hughes E-9 fre-control system and the ability to carry Falcon missiles resulted in the introduction of the F-89H in September 1955, with 156 examples delivered by August 1956, at which time Scorpion production ended. The wingtip pods of the H were designed to each

radius of six miles, virtually annihilating everything within a 1,000-foot sphere. The Js retained the FFAR-armed tip pods of the D or mounted 600-gallon tip tanks. One or two Genies (and later up to four Falcons) could be carried on underwing racks. F-89Js frst entered operational service in early 1957 and re-equipped Scorpion units through early 1958. The process of phasing Scorpions out of active service began in 1954, when all remaining F-89Bs and Cs were transferred to Air National Guard (ANG) units. With the arrival of the long-awaited supersonic interceptors (F-102As in 1956, F-104As in 1958 and F-101Bs and F-106As in 1959), the USAF started turning over its F-89Ds and Hs to ANG units during 1957, and the last F-89J had been transferred from active service by the end of 1960. Scorpions continued to serve with ANG units through the 1960s, the last F-89Js being retired from the 132nd FIS of the Maine ANG in 1969.

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57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron F-89s take a Cold War stance in Iceland in 1956.

Ground crewmen work on an F-94C Starfre in 1955. Open panel doors reveal 24 of its 2.75-inch Mighty Mouse FFARs.

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U.S. Air Force

wArren m. bodie collection

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in Korea for alert duty against North Korean night intruders and all-weather escort protection of B-29s. From early 1953 until the armistice, F-94Bs of the 319th FIS, operating out of Suwon, were credited with shooting down four enemy aircraft during night interceptions. In mid-1948, even before the F-94A was ordered, Lockheed had tendered an interceptor proposal to the USAF for the considerably more advanced Model L-188. While utilizing a fuselage similar to the F-94’s, the Built as an F-80, FA-356 was converted to a prototype for the T-33, F-94A and F-94B. L-188 was to be powered by a Pratt & Union had detonated an atomic bomb While most were attached to units within Whitney J48 and feature an entirely new caused the F-94 contract to be increased Continental Air Command, with a smaller thin-section wing. Due to other interceptor twice, frst to 288 aircraft, then to 368 before number serving with Alaska Air Command, projects in various stages of development, year end. Once the afterburner problem three F-94A/B squadrons were deployed to the Air Force expressed very little interest at the time. Lockheed, was fxed, the frst confdent that the F-94A was delivered aircraft would evento the USAF for tually be procured, testing in December proceeded with 1949. With a top construction of a speed of 606 mph, it company-funded fnally gave ADC an demonstrator in all-weather aircraft 1949, which flew capable of interceptunder civil registraing a Soviet Tu-4 tion N94C in early before it reached 1950. This resulted continental airspace. in a reappraisal of Thus despite many Lockheed’s project shortcomings such to the extent that as unreliable electhe USAF purtronic systems, frechased N94C and quent engine failordered a fully miliures, inadequate This Starfre was used for weapons testing at China Lake and Eglin AFB in the 1950s. tarized prototype as cockpit space and unsafe ejection seats, F-94As were placed in Japan in 1951-52 for Korean War service. the YF-97A. As a result of trials following operational service during the spring of Their initial mission was to protect Japan delivery, the YF-97A underwent numerous 1950 with two ADC units based in Wash- from possible incursions by Soviet bombers, refnements, acquiring a power-boosted ington state, the 317th FIS at McChord and but they were later moved to forward bases swept horizontal stabilizer to reduce vibrathe 319th FIS at Moses Lake. Whatever may be said of the early F-94s, they were still the first frontline USAF aircraft equipped with afterburners and the frst jets to equip ADC units. The externally similar F-94B appeared in late 1950 with improvements to the canopy, cockpit arrangement, instrumentation and electronic systems, as well as Fletcher-type inline tip tanks in place of the earlier underslung versions. In April 1951, the 61st FIS at Selfridge AFB in Michigan became the frst ADC unit to reequip with the B, and 356 examples had been delivered to the USAF by January 1952, bringing ADC’s force of F-94As and Bs to a total of 465 aircraft. F-94B 50-930 few with the 66th FIS and later the New York Air National Guard.

norTH aMerIcan F-86D/L

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he most numerous of the ADC’s interim all-weather interceptors were North American F-86D/Ls, some 2,506 examples of which were accepted by the USAF from 1951 to 1955. In early 1949, soon after the F-94A had been ordered into quantity production, concerns over the viability of the

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In April 1954, this F-86D was serving in the 68th FIS out of Itazuke Air Base, Japan.

F-89 program led Air Force offcials to seek yet another alternative, this time based upon North American’s excellent F-86 Sabre, just then entering operational service. From the start, a decision was made to retain the single-seat confguration, but changes needed to incorporate the electronics and weapons for an interceptor led to departures from the basic F-86 design of such magnitude that it was redesignated the YF-95A. Instead of cannons or machine guns, it was to be armed with 24 FFARs carried in a tray that retracted into the belly, and in a parallel project, Hughes Aircraft was given the job of developing an all-new fre-control system (E-3 and later E-4) that would enable the new interceptor to fre its rockets from a head-on course as opposed to a traditional pursuit curve from behind.

When the fnal design of the YF-95A emerged, it bore only 25 percent commonality with the F-86A. Although the aircraft shared a similar J47 power plant, the rear of its fuselage was redesigned around an afterburner that boosted available thrust by 28 percent. To accommodate the AN/APG-36 radar and Hughes fre-control system, the forward fuselage was faired into a bulletshaped radome over a reshaped, chin-type air intake. The cockpit layout was reorganized and enlarged for the additional electronic equipment, and access was improved with a redesigned canopy that hinged at the rear. Revisions to the empennage included increased fn area and an all-fying horizontal stabilizer in which dihedral was removed. Due to the urgency of the project, North American was authorized to start construc-

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tion at high Mach numbers, an enlarged vertical fn to improve directional stability and spoilers to enhance roll control. In lieu of gun armament, the nose section was modifed to accommodate a battery of 24 FFARs surrounding a radome that housed an AN/APG-40 radar set. In September 1950, after an offcial decision had been made to procure more than 600 aircraft, the designation was changed to F-94C and the factory name Starfre was applied, apparently only to this version. Although the frst F-94C production model was delivered in July 1951, development problems with the fre-control system and cockpit seals, combined with engine fameouts caused by gas ingestion when the rockets were fred, delayed actual service entry until mid-1952, when the Starfre became operational with the 437th FIS at Otis AFB in Massachusetts. Starting with the 100th production model, streamlined fairings containing 12 FFARs were added to the leading edge of each wing, doubling frepower, and the feature was retroftted to earlier Cs. Despite being 35 percent heavier than the F-94A/B, the F-94C’s added power and lower-drag wings yielded a top speed of 640 mph at sea level and allowed it to go supersonic in a dive. Progress in other interceptor programs caused procurement to be scaled back, so that a total of 387 F-94Cs had been delivered when production terminated in May 1954. At their peak during the mid-1950s, Starfres equipped 12 squadrons within ADC. Due to advances in interceptor development, the active service life of all F-94 variants was comparatively brief. The process of phasing out F-94A/Bs commenced in mid-1953, and F-94Cs had been removed from ADC’s active inventory by early 1959, with the last operational Starfre retired by the Minnesota ANG that summer.

A Sabre Dog assigned to the 514th FIS fres a Mighty Mouse salvo from its retractable belly tray at a target range near Wheelus Air Base in North Africa in May 1956.

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U.S. Air Force

level. Although the aircraft was still in the preliminary development stages, mounting tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union— mainly due to the Korean War—generated significant increases in the F-86D contract, and the total order had risen to 979 aircraft by the middle of 1951. Deliveries of production models began in March 1951, but F-86Ds on standing alert. By mid-1955, Sabre Dogs constituted 73 percent of ADC’s aircraft strength. continuing problems Lacking armament and electronic sys- with the fre-control and electronic fueltion of two prototypes in July 1949 and tool up to build 122 production aircraft as the tems, the frst YF-86D few from Edwards control systems caused actual operational F-95A. Soon afterward, the offcial designa- AFB in California on December 22, 1949. readiness to be delayed for two more years. tion was changed to F-86D, and in Sep- When the second, fully equipped prototype The frst production version to have true tember the contract was expanded to in- few seven months later, trials indicated a head-on intercept capability, Block 5s top speed of 692 mph (Mach 0.91) at sea equipped with E-4 fre-control systems, did clude another 31 aircraft.

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canaDa’S conTrIbuTIon: THe canucK

an airplane of such unprecedented sophistication took 450,000 man-hours (compared to 42,000 to design the North American P-51 Mustang), but on January 19, 1950, some three years after the project had been launched, the prototype CF-100 Mark 1 made its frst fight using Rolls-Royce Avon engines, since its Canadian-made Orendas were not yet ready. It proved to be an unqualified success, and the Korean War gave added incentive to production. On August 15, 1952, the Royal Canadian Air Force accepted the frst CF-100 Mark 3, an interim type that was soon superseded by the improved Mark 4. A CF-100 of 432 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force. The principal CF-100 also grown exponentially during World Mark 5 variant had a normal loaded War II—including the establishment of weight of 33,600 pounds, including armaA.V. Roe Canada at Malton, Ontario. Air ment of eight .50-caliber Browning Vice-Marshal Wilfred A. Curtis called on machine guns and 29 70mm folding-fn the new frm to produce a jet interceptor, rockets in two wingtip pods. Powered by the CF-100, as well as the CF-101 jet two Avro Orenda Mark 11 or Mark 14 trainer and the CF-102 airliner. Designing turbojets, the Canadian interceptor ©pF-AircrAFt/AlAmy

hile the United States was developing all-weather interceptors to counter the potential Soviet nuclear bombing threat, so was its neighbor to the north, whose military and industrial capacity had

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boasted a maximum speed of 650 mph at 40,000 feet, a service ceiling of 54,000 feet and a 700-mile combat radius. The pilot and radar operator/navigator sat in Martin-Baker Mark 2E ejector seats beneath a one-piece, rearward-sliding canopy. The CF-100 could also carry four Velvet Glove air-to-air guided missiles, which would be replaced during 1956 by more effective American-developed Sparrow IIs. Known offcially as the Canuck and unoffcially as the “Clunk” (for the distinctive sound its landing gear made during retraction), the CF-100 became the frst straight-wing jet fghter to break the sound barrier, on December 18, 1952, and the frst Canadian jet to fy across the Atlantic Ocean, on March 24, 1955. Besides being a mainstay of North American Aerospace Defense Command, it was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s frst all-weather fghter, with RCAF and Belgian squadrons serving in the vanguard of Europe’s defenses until 1961, when the Canuck began a gradual phase-out in favor of the CF-101 Voodoo and CF-104 Starfghter. Jon Guttman

E.R. Johnson is a novelist, aviation author and practicing attorney who writes from Arkansas. He is a U.S. Navy veteran and a major in the Arkansas Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. Suggested reading: Encyclopedia of U.S. Air Force Aircraft and Missile Systems, Vol. 1: Post World War II Fighters 19451973, by Marcelle S. Knaack.

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buILD an F-94c STarFIre

n 1957 Revell introduced a 1/54thscale model of the Lockheed F-94C Starfre. Today collectors can expect to pay more than $300 for an unbuilt kit. Since the 1950s, however, Hobbycraft, Emhar and Lindberg have all produced 1/72nd or 1/48th replicas of the F-94C, though they lacked any convincing details. Fortunately Kitty Hawk released the defnitive version of the jet in 2012. Kitty Hawk’s kit, no. 801010, has a full cockpit with etched-brass instrument panels and sidewall details. The two-place cockpit should be painted dark green, FS-34079. Spray the etched-metal side consoles and instrument panels gloss black, FS-17038. Overlay the pilot’s brass instrument panel with the kit decal and apply setting solution, so it conforms to the raised surface detail. You can highlight the rest of the cockpit brass with dots of red, silver and yellow paint and gray and white Prismacolor pencils. The F-94C’s ejection seats were a modifed version of those used in the Lockheed T-33. Paint the frames aircraft-interior black, FS-37031, with dark tan cushions, FS-30219, and fat red headrests, FS31136. Since the etched seat belts from Kitty Hawk are lackluster, I replaced them with a set from True Details’ “modern USAF seat belts.” Set aside the fnished cockpit to dry. Next assemble the engine and paint it in shades of burnt iron, dark aluminum and stainless steel. Don’t spend too much time on this, however, as it will be hidden once the fuselage is closed. Glue the interior of the airbrake mechanism from the inside of the fuselage, along with the nose gear well, which is attached to the bottom of the cockpit tub. Since this model looked like a “tail sitter,” I put several fshing weights in the nose before cementing the cockpit tub and engine in place. Then I glued together the fuselage sides. Next cement the main landing gear bay into the bottom wing cutout. Glue the top halves into position and attach to the fuselage. Note that dropped faps are an option with this model, but they can be positioned later. Next assemble the speed

dick Smith

not begin operational evaluations until mid-1952, and further testing and development led to many other improvements incorporated into subsequent production blocks: power-boosted rudder, new radios and single-point refueling (Blocks 10-15); fuel flter de-icing and 120-gallon drop tanks (Blocks 20-25); automatic approach coupler control and omni-directional radarranging (Blocks 30-35); new glide-path indicator and J47-GE-17B engines (Block 40); and drag parachute and J45-GE-33 engines (Blocks 45-60). The fnal batch of Block 60 F-86D “Sabre Dogs” was delivered in September 1955. The fnal interceptor variant, the F-86L, was actually an upgrade performed on 981 F-86Ds during 1956. Conversion entailed installation of the SAGE datalink system, which used a ground-based computer to transmit real-time radar information—target speed, altitude, bearing and range—to the aircraft’s E-4 fre-control system. F-86Ds began entering frontline operational service in March 1953, and by mid1955 accounted for 73 percent (1,026 aircraft) of ADC’s overall aircraft strength. At their peak, a total of 1,405 F-86Ds and Ls equipped 20 ADC operational wings. As supersonic interceptors reached operational service, the Sabre Dogs were rapidly phased out of frontline service from August 1956 to April 1958. Like F-89s and F-94s, large numbers of F-86Ds and Ls went to ANG units, serving until the last examples were withdrawn in mid-1965. As events actually transpired, the three stopgap interceptors ultimately bore most of the brunt of the Soviet bomber threat. Although history has revealed that the perceived threat was greatly overestimated, the huge ADC buildup—with more than 1,400 radar-equipped, rocket-armed interceptors in place by 1955—nevertheless represented a tangible deterrent against any Soviet inclination to make a frst strike against the continental U.S. J

brakes and main gear doors, each of which is ftted with etched-brass inserts. Time spent here folding the brass and carefully attaching the pieces with cyanoacrylate glue will defnitely pay off. Assemble the wing-mounted rocket pods and paint them gloss black. Note the pods can be displayed with the rockets exposed, but if you opt to display them closed, you can place a shark mouth motif on the nose. Once you attach the horizontal stabilizers, basic construction is fnished. Since the model should be dressed in several shades of unpainted aluminum, you’ll need to carefully fll all seams and sand them to a mirror-like fnish. Next apply a coat of Alclad II primer in preparation for the overall silver paint. The kit’s instruction sheet provides a guide to the various shades of aluminum. Two sets of markings come with the kit. I used the color scheme of an F-94C on display at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Ariz. The markings are from the 354th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, based at Oxnard Air Force Base in 1953. It takes patience to apply the decals. I cut the Lockheed “shooting star” and fuselage stripe into pieces, to keep it from curling and folding over on itself. The trim on the engine intakes and wingtip tanks wouldn’t conform to their compound curves, so I matched the decal color with a mix of red and orange paint, masked off the areas and sprayed them. The only other diffculty involves the canopy. The clear part is attached to a plastic frame, but the two pieces don’t ft properly. I had to adjust the assembly several times before gluing it with watch crystal cement. Dick Smith MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 43

Although never fown in combat by Americans, Martin’s Baltimore still emerged as one of the top Allied workhorses in the Mediterranean By Martin Hill

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the bomb bay, could extend that range for ferrying or recon­ naissance missions. Called the Model 187 by Martin, the Baltimore briefy held the designation A­23 while it was being considered by the U.S. Army Air Corps. But the Americans favored Martin’s A Martin A-30C in RAF B­26 Marauder and Douglas’ markings undergoes A­20 Havoc (called the Boston acceptance testing by the British). The French pur­ prior to being ferried to chased the Model 187 to replace Britain as part of the its aging Marylands, and the Lend-Lease program. bomber frst experienced com­ bat during the Battle of France. Once Paris capitulated, the French contract was subsumed by the British, who renamed their Model 187s after the city where they was built, Baltimore, Md. Aircrews simply called it the “Balt.” Later variants provided to the British under Lend­Lease would be designated A­30s by the U.S. Army Air Forces. This, however, was a technicality. Under Lend­Lease, only armaments in the U.S. inventory could be loaned to England. The A­30s were therefore delivered to the USAAF and then immediately transferred to the RAF. Eventually the Baltimore would see combat with almost every Allied air force in the Mediterranean—including the British, Aus­ tralian, New Zealand, South African, Greek and Free French air forces, as well as the Italian Co­Belligerent Air Force, formed in southern Italy after Rome’s surrender. But ironically it would never see active service in the USAAF. Stan Piet

B

y the spring of 1944, German troops on Crete and outly­ ing islands were facing growing supply shortages. With air superiority largely in Allied hands, air transport was proving nearly impossible and sea transport hazardous. Nevertheless, in the early hours of June 1, a German con­ voy of four merchantmen protected by a destroyer, four armed aux­ iliaries and aircraft slipped out of the Greek port of Piraeus and headed for Crete. It immediately became a high­priority target. Within hours, an attack force of 72 Allied bombers and fghter escorts began stalking the convoy. Representing squadrons from the British Royal Air Force (RAF), the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and the South African Air Force (SAAF), the attack force included a variety of aircraft. Mustangs and Spitfres provided pro­ tective cover, joined by Wellingtons, Marauders and rocket­armed Beaufghters that made up part of the strike element. But the bulk of the force consisted of an American­made bomber few people remember today, the Martin A­30 Baltimore. Variants of the Baltimore bomber played a major role in air operations throughout the Mediterranean. Designed in the late 1930s as a low­level attack bomber, it was largely a scaled­up ver­ sion of the Glenn L. Martin Company’s Model 167 Maryland then in use by the French air force. The Baltimore’s 48½­foot­long fu­ selage was longer and much deeper than its predecessor’s, but it retained the Maryland’s narrow width, endowing the newer plane with a distinctive fsh­like silhouette. Its 61­foot wingspan housed two beefy 1,600­hp Wright GR2600­A5B5 Double Cyclone engines that gave the Baltimore a top speed of more than 300 mph, mean­ ing the bomber could often outrun enemy fghters. Cruising speed was 220 mph, with a service ceiling of 24,000 feet and a fully loaded bombing range of 950 miles. An auxiliary tank, designed to ft into

The Baltimore’s crew consisted of a pilot, a navigator­bombardier, a top turret gunner and a radio operator who doubled as a gunner. In an emergency, auxiliary fight controls in the Plexiglas­enclosed nose allowed the navigator­bombardier to fy the plane. The Balt’s main punch was its 2,000­pound bombload, but it also carried a powerful sting for aerial combat. Each wing held two forward­fring .303­inch Browning machine guns. The original Baltimore, the Mk. I, had another Browning on a fexible mount in an open cockpit just aft of the pilot. This was replaced in the Mk. III with a Boulton­Paul turret packing four .303­inch machine guns, which in turn was replaced in the Mk. IV by a Martin 250CE turret, with a twin .50­caliber mount. The radio operator manned two machine guns on a fexible ven­ tral mount in the Balt’s aft­facing belly window. In addition to the

R/O’s guns, there were four fxed machine guns facing down and to the rear, operated by a foot pedal, to counter any fghters that few under the ventral gunner’s feld of fre. In later models, all these weapons were replaced by .50­caliber guns. Despite minor problems with early models, the Baltimore was well received by RAF pilots, who found it sturdy and easy to fy. One British test pilot wrote: “The aeroplane is nice to handle in all conditions of fight and at all loads. Its maneuverability is good and evasive action is easy. The aeroplane is extremely good on one engine; maintaining height with the greatest of ease on one engine even with the propeller of the ‘dead’ engine unfeathered.” Unfortunately, that only applied once the Balt got into the air. If the aircraft’s powerful engines weren’t perfectly synchronized during takeoffs and landings, it had a nasty habit of ground loop­ MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 45

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ground and large store dumps were ing. More Baltimores, in fact, were destroyed in this Baltimore show.” damaged or lost to ground loops While squadrons of Baltimores than to enemy action. Eventually a were earning their bones tearing landing procedure was developed up the Afrika Korps, other Balt by which the pilot approached the units were adapting their aircraft airstrip at low power and gunned to hunt German shipping and the engine only a few feet off the U­boats in the Med and the ground. Once the wheels touched Aegean Sea, and attacking enemy down, power was reduced again. air bases on Crete and other Despite its ungainliness on the islands. Here too Baltimore crews ground, the Baltimore became suffered teething pains. In June one of the Mediterranean’s top 1944, 16 Baltimores, including workhorses. Arriving just as Field eight from RAAF No. 454 Squad­ Marshal Erwin Rommel launched ron, were assigned to Operation his 1942 offensive, two squadrons Thesis, a raid to avenge the Nazis’ of Baltimores were thrown into execution of 100 civilians accused the British defense of El Alamein. of assisting British commandos. Flying in their original role as low­level attack bombers, the Balts The crew of a Baltimore Mk. IV of No. 223 Squadron, based Thesis involved a coordinated suffered heavy casualties from in Celone, Italy, returns from a mission on February 2, 1944. attack on German strongholds in Crete, beginning with a saturated groundfre and enemy fghters. When bombing from a medium altitude with fghter escort, how­ fghter sweep and followed by bomber attacks. It did not go well. Coming in low behind the fghters, the Baltimores encountered ever, they became a potent ground support weapon, incurring rela­ concentrated anti­aircraft fre as they approached Suda Bay. “We tively few casualties. In that latter role, the Baltimores helped perfect RAF Air Marshal were now under 100 feet and the ground fre was intense,” 454’s Arthur Tedder’s concept of tactical carpet bombing. Nicknamed Squadron Leader Lionel Folkard recalled. “We had fown less than the “Tedder Bomb Carpet,” this tactic involved a six­aircraft for­ half way to the target before we suffered serious damage. My air­ mation called a “box.” Three boxes were formed into V­formations, craft was the frst to be hit. When I took stock, I found the port or “vics.” Two waves, each containing one vic, or 18 aircraft, would engine was on fre and I was wounded in the left leg, also my right attack in succession from heights of 10,000 to 12,000 feet. The arm was hanging by a shred, and I was losing a great deal of blood intent was to lay a tight bomb pattern as close as 800 yards from onto the cockpit foor.” Folkard crash­landed near Heraklion on a beach laced with land British lines. Protected by fghter escorts, Baltimores and Bos­ tons bombed with such regularity and so few casualties that the mines. Miraculously, he and his crew—all of them wounded—sur­ Germans and Italians nicknamed the enemy formations the vived to become POWs. Others weren’t so lucky. Of the eight 454 Squadron Baltimores on the raid, only two returned to base. “Eighteen Imperturbables.” An RAF Balt pilot, speaking to workers at the Baltimore plant, Thirteen of the 32 Australian crewmen were killed. Nearly all the described a carpet bombing attack this way: “An area some 400 feet Baltimores on the raid sustained severe damage. As in North Africa, the Baltimore moved away from low­level wide and 1,200 yards long was enveloped in a great cloud of dust after the Baltimores dropped our bombs. A tremendous fre broke attacks to bombing from medium altitudes. The “Big Strike,” as out and a black pillar of smoke rose to 1,000 feet. Aircraft on the veterans of the June 1 convoy attack called it, was a classic example

A Baltimore Mk. II of No. 232 Bombardment Wing, RAF, kicks up dust as it takes off from a strip in the Western Desert in August 1942.

imPerial war muSeum Cna 2583

Baltimores and Bostons bombed with such regularity and so few casualties that the Germans and Italians nicknamed the enemy formations the “Eighteen Imperturbables.”

Baltimore Mk. IVs of 223 Squadron fly in a “Tedder Bomb Carpet” box formation to strike a railway at Sulmona, Italy, in 1944.

of such an antishipping mission. Once the German convoy slipped out of port, Baltimore reconnaissance aircraft began stalking it, constantly reporting its position while dodging escorting fghters and fak from destroyers. It was approaching evening when the strike force fnally intercepted the enemy ships. Marauders went in frst, followed closely by the Baltimores. “It was about 7 p.m. and still daylight when we attacked,” said Squadron Leader George Gray, who had replaced Folkard at 454 Squadron. “We managed to straddle a merchant ship and the South African Baltimores another. The rocket Beaus had a go at the merchant ships and some of the rockets went straight through without damaging them signifcantly....There was a lot of fak from the destroyers, but we were high enough to get away with it.” The initial attack left one cargo ship sinking and two more burn­ ing, one of which sank later that night. The next day the same strike force again targeted the survivors, which by now had reached port. The sky was flled with fak from both shipboard and land batteries. Six Beaufghters were lost, while the Germans lost another mer­ chant ship and a destroyer. One German merchantman had initially escaped to sea, but it was caught with the help of radar­equipped Baltimores. This last ship was badly damaged by the bombers, and fnally fnished off by a British submarine. With the fall of Axis North Africa in May 1943, the Baltimore squadrons moved on to see combat in Sicily and Italy. In those campaigns the squadrons continued to provide close ground sup­ port with the Tedder Bomb Carpet, but also developed a new tactic dubbed “intruder raids.” These involved lone Balts, fying between 6,000 feet and the deck under the control of ground radar, inter­ cepting and harassing enemy night movements. For this mission, the Baltimores were modifed with new bombsights and racks for dropping illumination fares. The bombers’ turret guns were also

oPPoSite: imPerial war muSeum Cm 3467

recalibrated for ground strafng. RAAF Pilot Offcer Alf Warner, another member of 454 Squadron, described an attack on a bridge crossing the Adige River during April 1945: “The bridge was being used by the retreating Germans. As usual, we went in low using guns against the defenses on the bridge and skip bombing with 250­pounders....Having dropped half our bomb load, we pulled away, pilot and gunners having a whale of a time.” Baltimore squadrons chased the Germans the entire length of the Italian peninsula to the Po River. The 13th Hellenic Squadron, along with squadrons from Italy’s Co­Belligerent 28th and 132nd groups, all equipped with Balts, few missions in the Balkans in support of Marshal Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia and Italian troops fghting the Germans in Albania. The end of the European war saw the quick dismantling of Baltimore squadrons. The last RAF Balts were used in Kenya for aerial mapping and insect control spraying until other aircraft replaced them in 1946. For a time, the U.S. Navy used a Baltimore to test supersonic airfoils. That Balt was donated to the Baltimore Public Schools sys­ tem, but neither it nor any of the other 1,574 Baltimores built by Martin survive today. Outside of a few memorials that have been established by former Baltimore squadron members, there are few reminders left of the Martin A­30 Baltimore. It is the forgotten bomber of WWII. J Longtime writer and editor Martin Hill is a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy reserves, and currently serves as a medical service corps offcer in the California National Guard. For further reading, he recommends: Alamein to the Alps: 454 Squadron, RAAF 1941­1945, by Mark Lax (available for free download at 454-459squadrons.org. au/downloads.html); and Martin 187 Baltimore, by Tony O’Toole. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 47

LINK to the

FUTURE High school dropout Ed Link invented a machine that revolutionized the way pilots are trained By Richard Bauman

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edwin a. link jr. collection/binghamton university libraries

Ed Link waves from the “cockpit” of his ingenious simulator.

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the United States are and will be producing.” The “scheme” lauded by Churchill relied upon the Link Trainer, the frst successful pilot training simulator. Its origins can be traced to American vi­ sionary and self­taught inven­ tor Edwin Albert Link, who dreamed up some very uncon­ ventional uses for pipe organ components from his father’s factory in New York State. Link Trainers became the primary tool for ground train­ ing of pilots from the mid­ 1930s to the early 1950s. Forerunners of today’s sophisticated air­ craft, spacecraft and ground vehicle simulators, they made it possi­ ble for thousands of would­be pilots to learn the rudiments of fying without endangering themselves, instructors or airplanes. library of congress

n December 30, 1941, Winston S. Churchill stood before the Canadian Parliament to offer Allied forces a rallying cry: “Another major contribution…to the Imperial war effort is the wonderful and gigantic Empire training scheme for pilots for the Royal and Imperial Air Forces. This has now been as you know well in full career for nearly two years in conditions free from all interference by the enemy. The daring youth of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, with many thousands from the homeland, are perfecting their training under the best conditions, and we are being assisted on a large scale by the United States, many of whose training facilities have been placed at our disposal. This scheme will provide us in 1942 and 1943 with the highest class of trained pilots, observers, and air gunners in the numbers necessary to man the enormous fow of aircraft which the factories of Britain, of the Empire and of

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d Link was born in Huntington, Ind., in 1904, but mostly grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., where his father owned the Link Piano and Organ Company. During the silent­movie era, the frm made organs for theaters as well as coin­operated player pianos. After his parents divorced in 1918, Link periodically lived with his mother, who had a propensity for moving from place to place. While they were living in Los Angeles in 1920, he took his frst fy­ ing lesson. Sidney Chaplin, brother of silent­movie star Charlie Chaplin, was his instructor. As Link recounted in Lloyd Kelly’s

An instructor gives pointers to a U.S. Navy offcer checking out in a Link Trainer during WWII.

book The Pilot Maker, after paying Chaplin $50 for a one­hour lesson: “I climbed up in the back seat of his Curtiss Oriole and belted myself in. For the better part of an hour we did loops and spins and buzzed everything in sight…but when we got down, I hadn’t touched the controls at all....I thought ‘that’s a hell of a way to teach someone to fy.’” Link reasoned there had to be a better and more economical way to safely instruct novices. Ed’s formal education ended in 1922, when he dropped out during his junior year of high school. His older brother, George, had excelled in college, and their dad expected the same from him. But while Ed liked mechanics and science, academics didn’t interest him. “From an early age,” noted Susan Van Hoek in her biography From Sky to Sea, “young Ed was preoccupied with how mechanical things worked.” His father, perhaps hoping to motivate his younger son to fnish

school, put him to work at the piano factory. Ed became an expert at assembling and tuning the company’s products, and then install­ ing pipe organs in theaters. When he wasn’t on the job, he could usually be found at a nearby airport talking to pilots, tinkering with aircraft and running errands. Some fiers allowed him to taxi their planes, letting him get the feel of the controls. “Ed began to wonder… why he couldn’t build a device that would provide all movements and motions of…[an] aircraft and thus would allow preliminary fight instruction to be given on the ground,” wrote Kelly. Working on nights and weekends, it took Link a year and a half to build his frst trainer in the factory’s basement. He adapted valves, bellows and motors from pipe organs to create motion in his device. As later described in a Link company publication: “It was a stubby wooden fuselage with a cockpit, mounted on an organ bellows…operated by an electrically driven vacuum pump, which MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 49

caused the fuselage to pitch and roll as the pilot ‘few’ the trainer....” The simulator was equipped with instruments, rudder pedals and a control stick, all of which responded realistically enough to give a would­be pilot the sensation of fight. Using Link’s training device, later equipped with a removable opaque canopy, pilots could safely learn how to fy “blind” on instruments. This would ultimately be one of the key factors in the trainer’s acceptance.

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Above: Link received a patent for his Combination Training Device for Student Aviators and Entertainment Apparatus in September 1931. Below: His Illuminated Aerial Display, patented in December 1934, added a wooden framework ftted with synchronized lights to an airplane’s underside, making it possible for businesses to advertise in the night sky.

illustrations: u.s. patent office

n 1929 Link fled for a patent for his trainer, which he received in September 1931. He demonstrated it at numerous fight schools and even tried to display it at the 1931 National Aircraft Exhibit in St. Louis, but the exhibit’s organizers rejected it as a “gadget.” The trainer met with little acceptance—except as an amusement park ride. Thus the curious title/description for patent number 1,825,462: Combination Training Device for Student Aviators and Entertainment Apparatus. As many inventors before and after him have learned, turning an idea into a product and then patenting it is often the easiest part of the process. Finding customers is the real challenge. Link would learn that persistence, luck and being in the right place at the right time, with the right equipment, were key ingredients to success. In hopes of making some money and proving his trainer’s value, Ed started the Link Flying School with a bold promise: He would teach anyone to fy, guaranteed, for just $85. Naturally his school focused on ground training using his own device. Ed proved the effciency and effectiveness of his technique by teaching his brother George to fy. After six hours in the trainer, and less than an hour of actual in­fight instruction, George was fying an airplane. Ironically, even though he soloed a few hours later, George would never pilot a plane again. He had no real inter­ est in fying, and had learned only to help out his brother. The school did well at frst, but as the Great Depression deep­ ened, fying lessons became a luxury few could afford. Meanwhile, Link managed to sell a few dozen trainers to amusement parks and a handful of aviation­related companies. His hoped­for break­ through, however, still eluded him. In the early 1930s, Link literally dreamed up a way for businesses to advertise in the night sky. His wife, Marion, recalled that Ed awoke one morning and told her about his dream to use an air­ plane with a wooden frame under its wings ftted with dozens of light bulbs as a new advertising vehicle. As various bulbs turned on and off, they would spell out a company’s name or product, which could be seen from the ground. In actual use, a punched music roll and pneumatic system from a player piano controlled the sequenc­ ing of the lights. And to make sure people would rush outside to see his roving ads, Link sounded a siren as he few over cities. He received a patent for his Illuminated Aerial Display in 1934. Link gained several advertising accounts, and while the Illu­ minated Aerial Display wasn’t a gigantic moneymaker, it helped keep his company afoat in the Depression. Today’s blimps still use a system akin to Link’s for nighttime advertising, sans the siren. In 1934 Link’s prospects started to look up as a result of some questionable political decisions and a remarkable fight by the inventor himself. The federal government had contracted with air­ lines to fy the U.S. Mail in the early 1930s. But on February 9, 1934,

national archives

Soon after the U.S. Army Air Corps ordered six trainers in 1934, production of—and demand for—the ANT-18 “Blue Box” took off.

It was a disastrous decision. Within the frst week, fve Army air­ men were killed. Airmail was typically fown at night and often in bad weather, and most of the Army pilots had received neither night­fying nor foul­weather training. During the 78­day fasco of Army airmail delivery, there were 66 accidents and 12 crew deaths.

edwin a. link jr. collection/binghamton university libraries

edwin a. link jr. collection/binghamton university libraries

President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended all airmail contracts, effective February 19, because of alleged improprieties by airlines seeking to boost their revenues. FDR’s move was apparently sup­ ported by Secretary of War George H. Dern, who had earlier as­ sured the president that the Army Air Corps could deliver the mail.

Link’s basic 1935 trainer relied on a wooden control stick.

By the 1940s, new versions refected advances in real cockpits.

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bettmann/corbis

Two fiers train in tandem at Roswell, N.M., during July 1943.

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school in the U.S. and Allied nations. It would be the “make­or­ break” machine for many would­be Army and Navy pilots, more than half a million of whom spent time in Link Trainers. The Blue Box could rotate 180 degrees and tilt on two axes, giv­ ing students the sensation of fying a real airplane. Its covered cockpit enclosed students, forcing them to rely on instruments rather than visual cues. And if a pilot lost control or mishandled the unit, it could even “crash.” Stationed at a control table next to the ANT­18, an instructor could simulate various flying conditions, transmit radio mes­ sages to the pilot and keep track of a student’s performance as he used instruments to “fy” the Link through various maneuvers. The course of each fight was traced on a map on the instructor’s desk. There were obvious economic and safety advantages to using the Link Trainer to teach basic fight techniques and instrument fying. It conserved precious fuel and preserved aircraft, not to mention the lives of pilots and instructors. As one instructor said, “No cadet ever lost his life in a Link.” In July 1934, with permission from the U.S. government, Link had sold a trainer to Okura & Company in Japan. Over the next year the Japanese military bought 10 more. The Japanese also invited Link and his wife to visit Japan so he could help them organize a training school for instrument instructors. The State Department encouraged him to go, undoubt­ edly hoping he would be able to With an instructor, radioman and pilot backing him up, a gather some information on navigator uses a Link Celestial Navigation Trainer in 1946.

Just hours after FDR’s edict was made public, Link’s colleague Casey Jones, realizing the Army would need pilots who were trained for instrument fying, had arranged a meeting between the inventor and Army offcials for the morning of February 11 at the Newark, N.J., airport. “The day dawned cold and foggy and thor­ oughly awful for fying,” Kelly wrote in The Pilot Maker. Army off­ cials arrived shortly before the appointment time, studied the sky and, concluding Link couldn’t fy in that weather, decided to leave. Then the drone of an airplane’s engine was heard, and moments later Link descended from the murky overcast. “He had made it on instruments [more than 200 miles from western New York] and the Air Corps concluded that he must know plenty about instrument fying,” wrote Kelly. It was an undeniable demonstration that fying in foul weather or at night was not only possible but that Link was an expert on how to do it. The Army ordered six trainers at $3,500 each. According to Kelly, “When the Army took delivery of its frst six trainers on June 23, 1934, simulators had made the grade and a new indus­ try was born.” n 1935 Link Aviation Devices Inc. was founded. The Link Trainer was becoming standard equipment in military and civilian fight schools. With the buildup of personnel and equipment as the world hurtled toward war, the Link ANT­18 Basic Instrument Trainer, dubbed the “Blue Box” by fedgling pilots, quickly became essential to every fight training

A pilot “fies” a Link F-89D in 1954, monitored by instructors.

edwin a. link jr. collection/binghamton university libraries

fying conditions. Behind the enclosed cockpit the “check pilot” Japanese military strength and status. Ed and Marion spent six weeks in Japan sightseeing and training had a duplicate set of instruments and buttons and switches for Japanese instructors. “Ed’s frst inspection trip of the training facil­ “introducing a variety of operating troubles, ranging from fuel tank ity where the trainers were set up suggested a second reason for the puncture or a fre to complete engine failure.” The C­11 was the trip,” Kelly wrote. “He was soon aware that one of the [trainers] frst in a long line of electronically based Link simulators. In 1954 Link Aviation merged with General Precision Corp. and had been completely disassembled and the mechanics were obvi­ ously having trouble putting it back together.” Link suspected it Link became chairman of the board. He would retire from the air­ had been taken apart so Japanese engineers could copy each detail craft simulator business in 1958 to start a new career in oceanic to make their own trainers. Asked to help reassemble the device, he exploration, designing and developing diving systems and manned submersibles. Among his many ventures was the Submersible De­ declined, saying he would need special equipment to do so. Link was constantly updating and patenting his trainers, adding compression Chamber of 1960, which let divers return to their ship improvements suggested by pilots. In the course of World War II, quickly from deep dives and decompress slowly on board rather his company also started building trainers for specifc aircraft. Link than having to make a slow, and dangerous, return to the surface. Aviation employed more than 1,500 people and produced in excess In 1967 the mini­sub Deep Diver became the frst submersible with a lockout system, whereby a diver could exit the craft to work on of 10,000 trainers during the confict. In 1939 Britain’s Royal Air Force ordered 250 trainers, and as the the ocean foor, then return to the sub to rest or go to the surface. war went on, the UK would buy several thousand more. Link Link also helped design the Cabled Observation and Rescue Device (CORD), one of the frst opened a plant in Canada successful remotely oper­ to produce trainers there ated underwater recon­ because his contract with naissance vehicles. the RAF required they Link never stopped must be built within the inventing. He continued British Commonwealth. to design and improve Another device Link small submersible ves­ invented during the war sels and other undersea years, the Celestial Navi­ equipment until his death gation Trainer, was used in Binghamton on Sep­ to train bomber crews in tember 7, 1981. In all, he night navigation. It en­ accumulated 27 patents, abled crewmen to prac­ also earning many awards tice using sextants to for his contributions to determine their aircraft aviation and science. He position based on star lo­ received the Howard N. cations from a projected Potts Medal in 1945 for display, which could be developing aviation train­ set up to replicate the Link’s company went on to produce simulators such as this B-52 trainer. ing devices. In 1992 he night sky anywhere in the world. Housed in a 45­foot­tall silo­like structure, the trainer fea­ was invested in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame, and he tured a fully outftted cockpit and movable “terrain plates” that was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003. Although Link’s original goal in 1929 was relatively modest—to simulated the ground passing below. In April 1946, Link patented the Star Globe. His patent applica­ teach people to fy safely at a reasonable price—his trainer had tion described it as “a classroom training aid for teaching the prin­ launched a new industry and changed the way pilots are trained. In ciples of elementary astronomy and celestial navigation…[and] to addition to the obvious improvements in training techniques, the provide a means for making the study of astronomy and celestial results can arguably be measured in lives and resources saved. Ed Link never fnished high school, but he received a total of fve navigation easier to be understood by the student.” The Star Globe was a transparent sphere accurately depicting the positions of stars honorary degrees, and he understood the value of education. Ed and constellations. Inside, a small platform represented the viewer’s and Marion would donate millions of dollars for college scholar­ ships in engineering and aviation via the Link Foundation. position relative to the night sky at any location. After the war, Link Aviation evolved from making aircraft train­ Biographer Van Hoek aptly summed up his remarkable career: “He ers to producing a variety of simulators for navigation, gunnery came to realize his potential through imagination rather than aca­ and numerous other training applications. In 1949 the company demia…[and thereby] failed to learn his limitations.” J introduced the C­11 Simulator, the frst for a jet fghter, the Lockheed F­80. Its interior was a duplicate of the actual aircraft, but Richard Bauman’s articles have appeared in more than 400 different the exterior looked more like a locomotive. regional, national and international publications. Further reading: According to an article in the February 1950 Popular Science, the The Pilot Maker, by Lloyd L. Kelly, as told to Robert B. Parke; and C­11 used 24 “electronic computers” to simulate aircraft status and From Sky to Sea, by Susan Van Hoek. MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 53

A set of colorful trading cards celebrates aviation’s early days By Dick Smith

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ometimes I wish I would have collected baseball cards instead of the ones with the airplanes,” said Buell Martin, a 91-year-old retired mail carrier and former World War II B-17 tail gunner. Martin might be forgiven his regret considering the relative value of those two types of collectibles today, when rare baseball cards can fetch thousands while aviation cards generally bring less than $10 apiece. Still, Martin’s collection of “Sky Birds” trading cards, issued by the National Chicle Company of Cambridge, Mass., in 1933 and 1934, has undeniable charm. The cards feature American, British, French and German World War I aircraft and their pilots, plus famous fgures such as arctic explorer Floyd Bennett, Italian aviation pioneer General Italo Balbo and the Spanish inventor of the autogiro, Juan de la Cierva. Martin started collecting as a youngster, buying cards when he visited a small convenience store on the campus of the New Britain (Connecticut) Teacher’s College. “The cards came one in a pack with a

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ALBATROSS TAUBE 1914 One of a number of aircraft based on Austrian Igo Etrich’s winged plant seed–inspired wing arrangement, the Taube (pigeon) was seen as exceptionally stable in 1912 but obsolescent by 1914. piece of bubble gum and cost around a nickel,” he recalled. “A lot of money for the time.” Printed in color, they measure roughly 2-by-3 inches. The faces of the pilot cards feature stylized images of the fiers in their cockpits or in candid portraits. The reverse sides offer brief histories of the pilot’s career, including war records, the types of aircraft fown and honors received. Cards featuring aircraft generally depict the planes in sweeping maneuvers or in combat, with a description of the type, including armament, speed and unusual features. In all, 144 cards were issued during 1933 and 1934. While most today are valued in the $10 range, a few legendary pilot’s cards (think Wright, Earhart and Lindbergh) have sold for hundreds of dollars. Inspired by his fedgling collection, Martin firted with becoming a pilot himself. In the mid1930s, he took his $5 savings and purchased an airplane ride at nearby Hartford airport. He subsequently took fying lessons, but never did get his license. “I didn’t stick with fying because I got more interested in girls and cars,” he recalled with a chuckle. J All cArds courtesy of Buell MArtin

CHARLES A. LINDBERGH “Lucky Lindy” became the world’s most famous man on May 21, 1927, after fying 3,610 miles solo from New York to Paris in 33½ hours.

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS The Ryan NYP was modifed by Lindbergh to make the frst solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Today it is preserved at the National Air and Space Museum.

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PARNELL PANTHER Entering service just after the war, Britain’s Parnall (ak a Parnell) Panther was a carrierbased reconnaissance plane with infatable bags and a paravane undercarriage for ditching in the water.

CAPTAIN JAMES N. HALL After serving in the British army, the Lafayette Escadrille and the 103rd and 94th Aero squadrons, James Norman Hall teamed with Charles Nordhoff on a number of books, including The Bounty Trilogy.

RENE FONCK The leading Allied WWI ace, with 75 victories, René Fonck made an unsuccessful transatlantic attempt in 1926. He ended WWII under a cloud of suspicion he was a collaborator.

MAJOR DONALD MacLAREN With 54 victories in eight months, Donald R. MacLaren was recognized as the top-scoring Sopwith Camel pilot, but he was prouder of his contributions to Canadian civil aviation. He died at 95.

WILLY COPPENS Belgian ace of aces Willy Coppens scored 37 victories, 35 of which made him history’s leading balloon buster. Though he lost a leg, Coppens lived to be 95.

56 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

DEPERDUSSIN MONOPLANE An early attempt to mount a machine gun to fre above its propeller, the Deperdussin TT’s arrangement was quickly abandoned in 1914. MAY 2014

ERNST UDET Germany’s second-ranking WWI ace, with 62 victories, Udet was a famous aerobatic pilot in the 1930s—later to be prominent in the Nazi Luftwaffe until he was driven to suicide in 1941.

SOPWITH SALAMANDER Sopwith’s specialized armored trench strafer, powered by a 220hp Bentley BR.2 rotary engine, had a brief frontline evaluation in May 1918, but production examples did not reach the front before the war ended.

D.H.10 BOMBER A de Havilland D.H.10 few one mission the day before the armistice and was almost attacked by French SPADs that mistook it for a German Gotha.

FOKKER TRIPLANE The frst operational fghter with a cantilever wing structure, the Fokker Dr.I was a fast-climbing, nimble but slow dogfghter— more famous than effective.

SPAD

EDWARD RICKENBACKER Race car driver, chauffeur to General John J. Pershing, commander of the 94th Aero Squadron and American WWI ace of aces, Rickenbacker went on to head Eastern Air Lines, and also survived an air crash in the Pacifc and 24 days in a raft during WWII. He died in 1973 at age 82.

France’s speedy, sturdy SPAD XIII was fown to victory by French, American and Italian pilots in spite of an unreliable geared engine.

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 57

AMELIA EARHART After crossing the Atlantic as a passenger in 1928, Amelia Earhart few a Lockheed Vega solo from Newfoundland to Ireland in 15 hours on May 20-21, 1932. She vanished during a round-the-world attempt on July 2, 1937.

WILEY POST Renowned for fying around the globe twice and pioneering the use of pressure suits at high altitude, Wiley Post was killed in a tragic crash, along with humorist Will Rogers, at Point Barrow, Alaska, on August 15, 1935.

BERNT BALCHEN Norwegianborn Bernt Balchen few over both the North and South poles with crewmen such as Roald Amundsen and Richard Byrd.

WINNIE MAE Wiley Post and Harold Gatty few the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae around the world in eight days in July 1931. It is now at the Udvar-Hazy Center.

RUTH NICHOLS

CAPTAIN JOHN ALCOCK

The only woman to hold simultaneous records for speed, altitude and distance, Ruth Nichols also became sales manager for Fairchild Aircraft.

Flying a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland on June 14, 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the frst nonstop Atlantic crossing, covering 1,890 miles in 16 hours, 12 minutes.

58 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

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REVIEWS BOOKS THE PULITZER AIR RACES: American Aviation and Speed Supremacy, 1920-1925 by Michael Gough, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, N.C., 2013, $45. Although the frst controlled, powered airplane fight was accomplished in the United States in 1903, by 1918 American aviation technology lagged far behind Europe’s. World War I had driven rapid advances in aviation development in Europe during the period when the U.S. had remained neutral. As a result, America didn’t have a single modern, battle-worthy airplane when it entered the confict, and its airmen were forced to fy foreign planes in combat. When the war ended in November 1918, U.S. aviation was regarded as second-rate. All that changed during the frst half of the 1920s. By 1925, American aircraft and aviators were regularly setting world records. One of the driving forces behind the turnaround was the Pulitzer Air Races. Run from 1920 through 1925, they were closed-circuit speed races, not unlike the Thompson Trophy races of the 1930s. Unlike the later Thompson races, however, the Pulitzer races were chiefy interservice competitions between the U.S. Army and Navy, since few others at the time could afford to compete against the military’s government-funded entrants. Much had been written about the history of the National Air Races, especially the later Thompson and Bendix trophy competitions, but no one has ever written a book about the Pulitzer races. Michael Gough’s new volume admirably rectifes that defciency. He maintains that the 1920 Pulitzer races provided the template for air competitions to come. Essentially they were run at low altitude within a triangular closed course before large crowds of spectators. Only three of the entrants were civilians, and in spite of repeated

invitations sent to the various European nations, none of their fiers ever participated in any of the Pulitzer races. The Pulitzer Air Races vividly captures a unique era when the Army and Navy expended a great deal of money and effort on air racing. It was a time when American military aircraft regularly set new records, and when military pilots such as Jimmy Doolittle and Al Williams became heroes of the American air-racing scene. There’s no question that a great deal of progress was made in aircraft technology through the Pulitzer races. The military, however, came in for criticism from some quarters over the funds spent on what was perceived as mere sport, as well as the cost in terms of military pilots injured and killed. After the last Pulitzer race was run, in late 1925, both the Army and Navy began to opt out, and U.S. government sponsorship of air racing came to an end. The late 1920s saw the beginning of a new era, in which civilians came to dominate the National Air Races. Robert Guttman FIGHTING HITLER’S JETS By Robert F. Dorr, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2013, $30. Bob Dorr and I are good friends, and one might suspect that the following glowing praise is offered on the basis of friendship. It is not. Bob has written many books, but this one is by far his best—and might well be the best on the subject. It’s not a typical Dorr book, for it fows in an informal style that will intrigue newcomers. But it’s also flled with an enormous amount of detail, so that a really well-informed buff will enjoy it as well. Reading it is like having a conversation with Dorr, and I suspect he enjoyed writing this book more than some others. He chooses to open and close his narrative with airshows. The frst took place at Insterburg in East Prussia on November 26, 1943, when the Luftwaffe was seeking to impress Adolf Hitler with the promise of the Messerschmitt Me-262. The second

was on October 13, 1945, at Freeman Field, Ind., where the American acquisition of top German technology was celebrated with fights by a captured Me-262. Tucked tightly in between those two airshows is a concise, well-developed and comprehensive presentation of the rise of all the German jet fghters, and the Allied steps taken to meet that challenge. Dorr outlines the many possibilities available to the Germans to employ their various jet aircraft against the Allies. In an interesting parallel approach, he charts the alternative actions the Allies took to fght the German jets on their own terms (hence the title). Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, buy this book: You will enjoy it! Walter J. Boyne ACES OF THE 78TH FIGHTER GROUP by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2013, $22.95. This is more than just another entry in the superb Osprey “Aces” series, because the fast-paced prose is tempered by the writing skills of veteran author Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. While it maintains the usual Osprey format of excellent, well-captioned photos, deftly annotated color profles and reams of data, Aces of the 78th Fighter Group is far more readable than most thanks to Cleaver’s time spent writing for flms. In a volume packed with vivid personal narratives, he manages to segue smoothly from one experience to the next, bringing the reader along with him. Beginning with the start of the U.S. air offensive in Europe in 1943, Cleaver presents the triumphant progress of the 78th Fighter Group through the war. Saddled at frst with early Republic P-47s, with their well-known defciencies in climb and turning fight, the group received progressively improved versions of the Thunderbolt until it converted to North American P-51s in December 1944. Its success could be attributed in great measure to the leadership provided in the early days by wellliked Colonel Arman Peterson. Most readers will appreciate the way Cleaver applauds the ground crews who MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 61

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made the aces’ efforts possible, as suffcient credit is rarely given to these men. While they were never in immediate danger as were the aircrews, their vitally important work was diffcult and often conducted under miserable conditions. The depth of Cleaver’s research shines through in his meticulous accounting of dates, times and places. Equally important, his writing accurately portrays service personnel as representative of a signifcant portion of the nation’s population—a far cry from the situation today, when only a small percentage of U.S. citizens are involved in its defense. Walter J. Boyne HERO OF THE ANGRY SKY: The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace edited by Geoffrey L. Rossano, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2013, $28.95. Among the cornerstones of U.S. Navy aviation during World War I was the “Millionaires’ Unit,” a group of Yale University students. They volunteered to train at Palm Beach, Fla., earned naval commissions and served over the Western Front. Most of them rotated through a variety of roles in the course of 1918, piloting British fying boats over the North Sea, Hanriot HD-2 foatplane fghters out of St. Pol-sur-Mer, de Havilland D.H.4 or D.H.9 bombers in RAF squadrons, Spad XIIIs with French naval escadrilles or Sopwith Camels with British units. Among them was David Sinton Ingalls, who during a stint with No. 213 Squadron, RAF, between August and October 1918, was credited with six victories, becoming the only U.S. Navy ace of the war. It would prove to be but one distinction that “Crock” Ingalls aquired in his lifetime. While no books have been devoted to any members of the “Yale Unit,” these literate airmen left behind a wealth of letters flled with wry candor, offering glimpses into the attitudes of their time and the development of naval aviation. In 1991 Geoffrey L. Rossano edited The

Price of Honor from the correspondence of Kenneth MacLeish, who replaced Ingalls in 213 Squadron. MacLeish had hoped to emulate his friend’s combat exploits, but he was killed in action on October 14, 1918. In Hero of the Angry Sky, editor Geoffrey Rossano presents Ingalls’ letters from the front with a wealth of insights, including an account of his anguish on learning of MacLeish’s disappearance. Although Ingalls’ eventful life is certainly worthy material for a future biographer (after WWI he went on to a long, distinguished career in the Navy, law and politics), Hero of the Angry Sky offers an invaluable starting point, covering a short but vital period in the pioneering airman’s own words. Jon Guttman

CLASSICS

THE STARS AT NOON by Jacqueline Cochran

Jacqueline Cochran said that her life’s story “went from sawdust to stardust,” a reference to a transition from an impoverished childhood in the sawmill camps of the South to a celebrated career as a trailblazer in the wild blue yonder. From the outset, her drive and determination come across in her plain-spoken memoir. During her hardscrabble youth, for example, she worked to acquire a treasured doll. Sadly, that toy was snatched from her the same day she bought it, but she vowed to track it down and retrieve it, which she did years later. Inspired to believe her dreams could come true by a kindly teacher who introduced her to books, Cochran set out for New York in 1929 to make it big. An inveterate networker, she persuaded the head of one of the city’s top beauty salons to hire her. At a dinner party she met successful fnancier Floyd Odlum, whom she eventually married. He suggested that she take up fying to facilitate the growth of a far-fung cosmetics business she had started. Once she had tasted fight, there was no going back. Aviation became her main focus. She began accumulating a string of record-setting fights and racing wins,

most notably the cross-country Bendix Trophy race in 1938. With war clouds looming, she championed the organization of a group of women pilots to relieve the military’s allmale cadre from noncombat fying duties. Her friend Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, endorsed the idea. During WWII she directed the organization that resulted from her vision, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). After the war ended, Cochran kept soaring to new heights and faster speeds. On May 18, 1953, she pushed an F-86 through the sound barrier, becoming the frst woman to fy supersonic. The Stars at Noon, published in 1954, is a thrilling narrative flled with enough exhilarating vignettes to inspire many squadrons of aspiring fiers. But serious students of history should also read Jackie Cochran: Pilot in the Fast Lane, published in 2004 by Doris L. Rich, who reveals the complete and unvarnished truth about Cochran’s career. It corrects misrepresentations from earlier works and also covers the remaining 26 years of Cochran’s eventful life not chronicled in The Stars at Noon. We learn, for example, that Jackie was not orphaned, as she had claimed, and her real name was Bessie Pittman. She assumed a new identity when she moved to New York, reportedly plucking the name Jacqueline from a telephone directory. Her last name, Cochran, came from a salesman with whom she had a liaison at age 14. They eventually married, but divorced after six years. At the outset of America’s space program, Cochran opposed female participation in the astronaut corps, dashing the hopes of women pilots. Some claimed that her paradoxical views stemmed from her eagerness not to be outshone by other women. Late in life, despite advancing age and declining prestige, Cochran continued to strive for new aerial milestones. In 1963, at the controls of the hot Lockheed F-104 Starfghter, she became the frst woman to fy faster than twice the speed of sound. Jacqueline Cochran died on August 9, 1980, following a long illness. In accordance with her wishes, tucked inside her coffn was the doll that had meant so much to her, and which had come to symbolize her iron will. Philip Handleman MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 63

AIRWARE

By Bernard Dy

A Work in Progress Don’t discount Kerbal Space Program just because it’s still in beta

T

hough some predicted they’d be dead by now, fight simulations continue to thrive in various forms. Kerbal Space Program (kerbalspace program.com), which costs $27, puts the gamer in charge of the space program for the fctional Earth-like planet Kerbal, whose inhabitants resemble humans. Despite its whimsical setting, this game is quite serious about its physics. Note that Kerbal is currently still in development; it’s becoming common for some games to acquire funding by giving fans early access. In its current state, Kerbal is sort of a sandbox where players can experiment with creating different kinds of spacecraft to explore the Kerbal universe. There are some scenarios, with general spacecraft-building goals, but as yet the sim lacks a true overriding objective or mission framework.

64 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY

MAY 2014

There are disadvantages to playing with a work in progress: Documentation and tutorials are either sparse or incomplete, the game engine isn’t optimized yet and at times suffers from slow performance, graphics are more functional than beautiful and there may be bugs. Kerbal’s interface is not diffcult to use, yet familiarizing yourself with it takes time, as the game isn’t very intuitive. It has been in development for years, and it’s not known when it will be complete.

Still, some players may fnd the sandbox too charming to ignore. Kerbal offers an impressive array of command modules, fuel boosters, engines and fuselage parts for rocketry enthusiasts. The player community might indeed be Kerbal’s best feature. Dozens of user-made modifcations and extras are available for free download. Those who are more interested in terrestrial aviation will be happy to hear the physics engine supports atmospheric fight, and some very creative users have even submitted airplanes and helicopters for use at the site hosting user content, kerbal spaceport.com. The game’s underlying premise seems to be “If you can dream it you can build it,” an inspiring sentiment. Kerbal Space Program’s popularity and the creativity of its user base indicate that the model pioneered by the venerable Microsoft Flight Simulator isn’t dead just yet. J

FLIGHT TEST

By Jon Guttman

Twin Boom

A.

Match the silhouette with the P-38 predecessor, contemporary or successor.

B.

1. Caproni Ca.3 C.

Stranger Than Fiction 1. Which of the following members of royalty flew wartime sorties during their careers? A. King Albert of Belgium B. Edward, Prince of Wales C. Andrew, Duke of York D. All the above

2. Saab 21R 3. Rutan White Knight and SpaceShipOne D.

4. Focke-Wulf Fw-189

E.

2. Which WWI ace was noted for landing his plane safely after fabric was torn from its wing—twice? A. Edward Rickenbacker B. Manfred von Richthofen C. James A. Meissner D. All of the above

5. Gotha Go-242 F.

6. de Havilland DH.115 Vampire G.

7. Northrop P-61B Black Widow H.

3. Which WWI ace survived flying through an exploding balloon? A. Friedrich Noltenius B. Pierre Cardon C. Giovanni Ancilotto D. All of the above

8. Blohm und Voss Bv-138C I.

9. Porokhovshchikov BiKok 10. Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar

4. Howard and Clinton Burdick share what unique distinction? A. Brothers in the same fghter squadron B. Father and son aces in two wars C. Father and son test pilots D. Brothers killed in the same bomber

J.

1. Britain

B. PZL P-24G

2. Colombia

C. Curtiss P-40B Tomahawk

3. Finland

D. Martin 167 Maryland

4. Belgium

E. Curtiss F11C Hawk II

5. Spain

F. Gloster Gladiator

6. Paraguay

G. Nieuport-Delage NiD.52

7. China

H. Nieuport 28

8. France

I. Fokker D.XXI

9. Greece

J. Potez 25

10. United States

illustrations by mark drefs

Answers: Twin Boom 1.F, 2.I, 3.J, 4.G, 5.H 6.E, 7.A, 8.C, 9.B, 10.D

A. Fiat CR.42

Combat Debut—Elsewhere A.4, B.9, C.1, D.8, E.2, F.7, G.5, H.10, I.3, J.6

Match the warplane to the frst country to use it in combat.

5. Which Battle of Britain ace, after being hit in the radiator, climbed, turned off his overheated engine and glided—then repeated that sequence all the way across the English Channel? A. Hans-Ekkehard Bob B. Robert Stanford Tuck C. Adolf Galland D. Colin Gray

Stranger Than Fiction 1.D, 2.C, 3.D, 4.B, 5.A

Combat Debut—Elsewhere

MAY 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 65

LOCKHEED MARTIN

AERO POSTER

“Be proud, America” was one of a series of advertisements created by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to celebrate its P-38 Lightning (story, P. 22) during World War II. This striking view of the sleek, twin-engine fighter from two unusual perspectives, on the ground and also in formation flight, appeared in a 1942 issue of LIFE magazine. 66 A V I A T I O N H I S T O RY MAy 2014

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