Cool airplane photo thread

Thanks for the correction, Tay. I must have picked that up when I was working on the Siemens painting. I'm surprised because I never make misteaks. I'm hardly ever rong.

 

No cool airplane thread is complete without a Bonanza.






Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I think that I saw my first Bonanza when I was working at the airport in Sarasota in 1947. What a splash that thing made when all that was flying then were fabric covered Stinsons and Wacos from before the war. Seventy three years later it is still a "modern" airplane and I'm a 94 year ol' goat.

 

Yes.
The first model plane I built was a V-tail Bonanza, in '51 or so... I was in 1st grade. It was solid balsa, not plastic.
First plane ride was in my Uncle's '50 Bonanza.

 

P38 with a nice looking camouflage
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Unfortunately, the British made the dumb decision to order their Lightnings without turbochargers, which completely sapped the planes' altitude performance. They didn't keep them in service very long.

 

The Brits sort of got them by default, the planes were made for France, but after France was occupied, they were sent to Britain. (I think)

Yes you can tell from that pic there are no turbos on that plane.
I also think? I read somewhere that they did not have 'handed' engines, either.

 

P-322s were pretty useless as originally produced. Sent back to the US or never shipped overseas and retrofitted with counter-rotating engines and turbo-chargers and used for training. Dad went through P-38 training at Williams, but by the time he finished, they needed P-47 and P-51 pilots instead of P-38 pilots, so to P-47Ds he went. Ended up with the 86th FBG.

 

I have known several P-47 pilots and several P-38 pilots and their stories of flying those two airplanes are interestingly as different as the airplanes. I may have mentioned my late friend Larry Blumer who shot down 5 FW-190's in about 5 minutes. This happened in the biggest aerial mayhem in WW2 and his victories were not the result of dogfighting but mostly of the boom and zoom style of confrontation. He did shoot down several other FW-190s but they weren't the Spitfire type of dogfight. He used his speed, position , and deadly firepower. Flying through the debris of his target damaged his airplane many times. The P-47 guys used their "tank' in much the same way. They were strong, fast in a dive, and had heavy firepower. In the right hands they were very dangerous. I mentioned it before where a friend who flew P-47's ran out of ammunition and simply rammed the Ju-88 ahead of him and cut the tail off of it. He got home safely but with a wound from the debris of his canopy that was heavily damaged from the ramming. I imagine that your dad knew all about this airplane, Taz.

 

A detailed survey in Wings/Airpower magazine years ago combined air-to-air with air-to-ground ability and ranked the P-47 the best overall fighter of World War II. That probably made Mustang, Spitfire and Corsair fans very angry!

 

By the time Dad got to Europe, the only P-38s left there were F-6 photo recon birds. They loved them in the Pacific, where most of the flying was at lower altitudes, but not so much in the ETO, where most flying was higher altitude.

 

High altitude is where they found that it was impossible to adequately heat the P-38 cockpit.

 

Bob- That is the sad part, because the P-38L could outclimb the P-51D and just about everything except an Me-262. If the pilot is freezing to death and cannot see outside, though, does not do you much good. Much like the DH-2 pusher in WW-I. McCudden was quoted as saying on one mission that he was so cold he did not care if anybody shot him down.

 

Minor correction: the P-38 photo birds were either F-4s or F-5s; the F-6 was the photo Mustang.

 

Jim- Affirmative, should have looked it up since memory did not hack it.

 

Cold. I had a brief experience of minus zero temperature on a B-24 flight when my heated suit quit. The cold creeps in like some kind of demon that can't be stopped . Almost panicky feeling. I made several trips to the flight deck to warm up but very little up there even with the Southwind heaters going full blast. WW2 and still primitive.

 

Bob- I can sympathize. On the coldest day or our 6 years in Clovis, NM -10 F, we took off and had an F-111D with a full cold cockpit. Over Alamosa, CO the surface temp was -45 F, and we finally decided to abort because we were afraid our feet and hands were getting too numb to land.

 

We were somewhere near that temperature, too. I know also that extreme cold like that over time impairs the brain and slows things down. I made a couple of stupid errors, like taking one of my gloves off, that were caught by the flight engineer.

 

Terry,
Speaking of Cannon, I just closed a real estate deal for a young pilot from Cannon who bought a crash pad here in Lubbock. I told him I knew of a former Cannon F-111 driver who made it from Reese AFB to Cannon before he left. He emailed me last night to say that he had tried to accomplish that feat but had failed.

Tex

 

Tex- Lubbock was our "big town" back then and 104 miles away. In the olden days, F-111 pilots were critical resources and they would not let them leave Cannon AFB, even to go to England. Resulted in a lot of excellent IPs getting out of the AF.

 

Since we were talking about the Siemens-Schuckert D.IV, here is a photo of Leutnant Karl August von Schoenebeck with his SSW D.IV in 1918.



Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

PT-13s stored post-WW2, destined for destruction.

Image Unavailable, Please Login