Re: I won't fly with that sonofabitch. He'll kill us all.

Bombardier wrote:
There was a saying in the old 344th. "If a pilot is afraid of his
plane, he'll eventually crash it and kill himself and his entire
crew"..And this was especialy true of groups that flew B-26 Martin
Marauders.The B dash Crash, the Baltmore Whore, the One a Day in Tampa
Bay, the Widowmaker, the Flying Coffin. Luckily I flew with Paul
Shorts, a great pilot who always was in control ol' WIllie the Wolf.
I survived, but many didn't. Anyone know of similiar situations with
other aircraft?

Art

www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

When did you start stuttering, Art? I got four (count 'em four) identical
copies of the above message. Anyway, in my whole flying career (from WWII to
VN), I never knew of a pilot who admitted being afraid of the equipment we were
using. The only possible exception was a poor soul who just plain could not get
checked out in a C-46 no matter how hard he tried (during the post-Korean War
era). Of all the weird things that happened, he got tapped to transition into
jets for ultimate assignment to Viet Nam. When we knew that he was aloft in a
T-80 in the Tokyo area, the rest of his former mates all developed a case of the
squirts or any other wild excuse we could dream up in order to stay on the
ground and out of his way. Sadly, he finished his tour and got out of the
service, and then volunteered to go back to Nam as a civilian Information
Specialist for AID or some such organization. He managed to get himself
captured by the VC and become the first US civilian executed in that war. His
name is on the wall in Washington.

To answer your question (but not from personal knowledge), there was a time when
the C-46 developed a tendency to explode in flight (while flying the Hump in
WWII) that reportedly rattled the crews who had to fly them. From what I
remember of the cause of those events, it was a badly designed fuel booster pump
that had a tendency to throw a spark when it was turned on at high altitudes,
which they had to do in flying the Hump. IIRC, they had to get up to somewhere
between 15 and 20K in order to clear the Himalayas into and out of China. I
don't know how many they lost before they figured out what the problem was and
fixed it, but it was more than just a couple.

George Z.


.

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