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Very cool Gary - Take earplugs! Huh? I said Take earplugs! Huh? Never mind.

Is it out of Fredrick? There's a bare metal one that I see fly out of there occasionally. Looking forward to hearing about it.

The local news (WJAC) ran a story this AM about a B-17 that is at State College. They've been giving rides to area vets who flew them. The local reporter went up with his grandfather. Certainly a welcome change from the usual drugs and shootings.

Link:

http://wjactv.com/news/local/wwii-veteran-grandson-fly-together-in-b-17-bomber

Dale

Congratulations Gary !!!! You have more huevos than me ...... I am deathly afraid of heights. Twenty feet is my limit :):):) So, an old man who has never left the ground, will be anxiously waiting to hear about your flight. "TOUJOURS AU DANGER"


John

Enjoy the flight! Sounds like a great experience. Borrow one of those wearabe vido cameras if you can.

My uncle was a bombadier in North Africa and Italy. Wish I could have had the chance to hear his stories. He stood all of about 5'3".
My dad was in ordance in France. Careful what you wish for in driving a tank ... he had a hatch come down on him and suffered terrible neck pain forever.

Funny thing is I'm deathly afraid of heights, too. I get shaky on a step ladder, but I love to fly. Weird, huh?

Yeah, heights can bug me but flying is a different thing. I think its a vertigo thing with me when it comes to heights on the ground. I look at pictures of high steel workers, especially the older photos, and wonder how the hell those guys did it.

My dad flew a p38 thunderbolt in WW 2.

37.5 missions, shot down, taken prisoner and escaped. Pretty wild deal, said he melted a lot of 50 caliber barrels. Passed out a lot when they would pull up......no G suits back then.

I drove a M60A3 and and op for training mission Sheridan dressed up with a T62 fiberglass shell.

The Sheridan was way funnier to drive.
Loading and shooting the M60A3 was an absolute hoot!

The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was the fighter plane in WW2





The P-38 was another war plane

The P38 was the Lightning, the twin engine, twin tail boom fighter. Richard Bong, a top Ace (and more famous here for owning a Savage 99) flew a P38 Lightning. The P38's did not fair all that well in the European theater because much of it was fought at high altitude and they used Allison engines which did not have the high altitude performance - they excelled in the Pacific theater because they had long range capability, P38's were used on the mission to track & shoot down Admiral Yamamoto.

I live about 2½ hours from OshKosh, WI were the EAA holds their Fly In every years and have been going regularly for over 40 years, if you want to see WWII era planes, and see them fly, it's the place to visit. I have had the opportunity to see almost every WWII era US fighter and a few others including a British Supermarine Spitfire fly. They even had the last flying British Avro Lancaster there one year I attended. For several years there was a flying DeHavilin Mosquito, these were the fastest propeller planes of the war and were made from plywood so they were light and were powered by twin Rolls Royce Merlins.

The father of my first wife was English, a little too old for service in WWII (was in the Home Guard though). He lived in a suburb of London and worked at the Hawker aircraft factory. He was a section supervisor there and he and his guys made the fairings that blended the aluminum wings to the cloth covered fuselages of the Hawker Hurricane fighters (using the traditional "English Wheel" and wooden bucks to form them). Every one of those planes that took to the sky had his fairings on it. (The Spitfire gets all the glory, but Hurricanes were equal in number in the early days of the war, and were regarded as more than a match against Messerschmidts too.)

(Side note: his boarding house was hit during the Blitz one night while he was finishing a three day straight work shift. He came home to find his third floor apartment exposed to the world- the entire outside wall was blasted off, but his furnishings were intact and as if nothing had happened. He went up, discovered the hot water still worked and took a quick bath before gathering up his stuff. After closing his eyes for just a second he woke up 12 hours later and incurred the wrath of a Bobby who had reluctantly granted him permission initially to run upstairs and grab his things.

Around the same time he took his GF to a dance hall one night. After leaving early "to go back to her place", they weren't but a block away when the air raid sirens sounded as simultaneously bombs started to hit. Big SNAFU, the Germans got through undetected. A big one hit the dance hall they had just left, killing a staggering number of people and started a fire that took most of the rest. He and his girl spent the rest of the night helping the Fire Brigade combat the blaze and then to drag burnt corpses from the ruins. Helluva date night.)

After the war he migrated to America, met a woman and married her in 1950, and had a couple kids. When I knew him in the 1970's-80's he was in his 70's and 80's.

I got six rides in the back seat of an EA-6B Prowler when deployed to Japan. I was assigned to them. A few pilots tried getting me sick, to no avail. Anyways, we once flew just south of the DMZ in South Korea. This was the same day that President GW Bush was there for the first time and looking across it would binoculars. I was thinking that if we had to eject for whatever reason and I drifted over to the north side, that life would really suck pretty quickly.

Have fun Gary.

Got me going, on the internet, that is. My MIL's uncle Vladimir Kovalchick, was on the B24 Liberator, "Squat N Droppit", plane #41-28710, when it was shot down near Bonnehain, June 12,44. Nose art wasn't the greatest, but I always loved the name. If you check out " American Air Museum in Britain" and click on "Aircraft" and go to page 19 they have several pretty good pics. Cruising that site, it's amazing how many planes we put into action, Joe.

I can't seem to get the pics to post. It's a great site to search if you know the name of the plane you are looking for, or search the persons name, Joe.

I always loved it when we got the airborne troubleshooter program started back up when I was in VAQ-35 and could get some of our sailors up to see what their hard work resulted in. It was also handy if you sheared a starter shaft or some other relatively easy fix on the road and could get them and parts there organically and not have to deal with NALO for transport.

I flew one of my guys over to Mountain Home once to fix something and they had us cut through the EW range at low level (200' 500 kts) as the range above was in use. He told me afterward we had pretty much ruined him for roller coasters.

I never did understand the pilots that tried to get folks who got a ride sick. This was supposed to be fun/motivational/informative and not an ab workout.

Pugs (2400 Prowler hours and 502 traps)

"Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
sonuvabitch, lost again!"

A P38 saved my Father's bacon. They were returning from a mission over Germany when they had to drop out of the formation due to loss of an engine I believe. They were over the English Channel when a German fighter came after them. A P38 showed up in time to run the German away. My Father said they wouldn't have lasted long in the water if they had to bail out over the Channel. David

My dad flew a p 47 thanks for the correction.
He would mention the p 38 ,I think it might have replaced the p 47 for bomber escort.
The p 38 is also the name for the can opener we were issued for C rations.
I get them numbers confused all the time.


There is no doubt they were all heroes.

My father was a B-25 pilot in WWII, flew for the Marine Corp. We have many pictures of his his crew standing in front of his plane #4. I am envious of your ability to ride in a B-25....good for you.

FYI....I saw a B-25 take off from the Easton, Md airport a few years back.

Doc

Haa, my office is right across I-70 from the runway. I see pretty much everything that goes in and out of here. We get a lot of cool stuff flying past my window. We get everything from the Confederate Air Force to modern war planes and choppers. A few times a year there's a B-17 that comes here and gives rides. It'll fly right over me about 10 or 15 times a day when they do it.

We Marines called the C ration can opener a John Wayne can opener. My wife found an early set of my dog tags recently and the can opener is marked "US SPEAKER". Nothing about P-38 or John Wayne. Sorry this is getting off the subject. At my age reminiscing makes my mind wander. David

Pugs,

I bet you a shiny penny that I know some folks that you do as well. I spent a little time at Whidbey, but not like you. I was the MMCO with VMAQ-2.

Prowler people were awesome. They embraced the team concept which spilled over to the maintainers. The fighter squadrons had a complete different attitude.