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grover posted:Hot radials on this bird, two 2,250hp Pratt & Whitney R-2800-65W Double Wasp radials to be exact. Was the first US aircraft designed from inception to use radar, and our best night-fighter of WWII. Actually, these were even more awesome than that. The four guns on the fuselage were 20mm cannons, which pack one hell of a punch. Crazy thing is they almost rejected it in favor of keeping the de Havilland Mosquito as the primary night fighter, but were convinced otherwise when a Northrup Grumman test pilot showed how much better the Widow was. Supposedly it was one of the best handling aircraft of the war, thanks to some good engineering and the use of spoiler ailerons.
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Mar 10, 2010 14:05
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VikingSkull posted:I think there's a P-40 down in the south surrounded by Migs Is that a B-25 three birds south of the crazy B-29 AWACS?
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Mar 26, 2010 06:26
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I actually got to meet the pilot of this plane, Hank Hendrickson, and spend a couple hours hearing stories as we crawled around in the Boeing Museum of Flight's B-17. They were hit on their approach to a target over Germany, before dropping their payload. The ball turret gunner and one of the waist gunners were both killed instantly, but the navigator somehow managed to survive being about 3 feet from the shell exploding. He was thrown free of the aircraft and was lucky enough to have been wearing his parachute, and wound up spending the rest of the war in a POW camp. After dropping the bombs over the target and turning back, this thing actually held together the 600 or so miles back to base in England. Hank said it was the softest landing he had ever made. He's on the left in these photos.   
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Mar 31, 2010 08:40
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talk show ghost posted:Heavy metal was accurate about the interior, hah. Pretty much every bomber from that war had an absurdly cramped interior. I have no idea how crews got out when the things were hit, because there is hardly enough room to turn around. The nose position in a B-25 pretty much consists of being crammed into a 3 foot high cabinet.
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Apr 14, 2010 05:24
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SyHopeful posted:German pilots also attacked bombers head-on, since it was the least-defended area. Lots of pilot/co-pilot exposure that way. It's why the B-17G got the chin turret. Yeah, if I remember correctly the preferred attack pattern was to come in either head on or in a dive strafing across the wings and cockpit. Of course, the poor bastard in the ball turret was really hosed if the hydraulics failed and the pilot had to do a belly landing. Without power the turret couldn't rotate to where the hatch could be opened, and he was stuck until the plane landed one way or another. Another tactic the Germans loved was to send a captured bomber up to the formation to relay altitude and position to the flak and fighters ahead. A couple of the veterans I talked to mentioned seeing these, and that they learned pretty quickly to unload on any plane that didn't have the right squadron tail code.
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Apr 15, 2010 09:37
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orange lime posted:I dunno what turret you're thinking of, but the Sperry turrets were electrically powered and had backup hand cranks as well. drat, that's what I get for posting before going to sleep. I distinctly remember reading about turrets getting jammed up and some poor gunner getting squished on a belly landing. It was still a lovely job to be stuck in a bubble for 10 hours at a time.
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Apr 17, 2010 03:41
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The Kee-Bird was a gently caress up of mammoth proportions on the part of the salvage guys. I read a book that had quite a bit on it a while back, and they tried to turn it into a publicity stunt instead of focusing on getting the bird out. The team leader had latched onto the idea of flying the thing out even though it was completely unfeasible. I don't know about you, but I would think twice about taking an aircraft up that had been sitting exposed to the elements for decades.
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Jul 21, 2010 06:16
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