Fly Boy ?????

"Tex Houston" wrote:
"Bill Silvey" wrote in message

Hey, that was in Flight of the Phoenix, wasn't it?

I have no idea which they used in the movie. I saw it when it first came
out and never since.

It was a C-119. At the Univ. of South Florida, my Management 101
professor showed "Flight of the Phoenix" to the class to illustrate
various management styles. Interestingly enough, he said that
Jimmy Stewart (who played the Capt. of the ship) was a poor
manager yet the alcoholic co-pilot (Richard Attenborough) exhibited
the "proper" method to manage people! As the prof explained it,
Attenborough was the one who was responsible for group cohesiveness
(despite his boozing) while Stewart did all the wrong things by acting
like a self-centered, tempermental blowhard. Apparently CRM was
foreign concept to Stewart, huh? )

outstanding post, Chris - exactly what I come to this newsgroup to read.

v/r
Gordon

Here's a description of a 310th B-25 ditching episode on what was expected to
be a milk run

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: "Gord Beaman" )
Date: 10/24/03 7:49 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

(ArtKramr) wrote:

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: (Peter Stickney)
Date: 10/23/03 9:41 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: rhaanb-9f1.ln@Minesha

Note to Art: The Martin B-26 also wasn't a good candidate for
ditching, either.

No kiddiing. We had 30 seconds before the B-26 dove for the the bottom.
Those
of us who served in B-26's were well aware of that as proven in ditching
tanks.

Arthur Kramer

Proven?!?. I doubt that, 'Estimated' maybe...certainly not
proven.

Art, I don't think that you'd be smart to bet on those 30
seconds. Mind you, you may have 30 hours depending on how the a/c
hit the water among lots of other things.

I've done hundreds of ditching drills where we needed to get an
18 man crew out on the hangar floor carrying their proper items.
We could usually do it but remember that you're doing the testing
in a nice warm lighted hangar, not the middle of the North
Atlantic in a winter gale after the trauma of a night ditching...
--

-Gord.
..

I am not talking about drills in a hanger. I am yalking about one a day in
Tampa Bay. And lives lost and lessons learned the hard way.
..
Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: (Autocollimator)
Date: 10/24/03 7:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: "Gord Beaman" )
Date: 10/24/03 7:49 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

(ArtKramr) wrote:

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: (Peter Stickney)
Date: 10/23/03 9:41 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: rhaanb-9f1.ln@Minesha

Note to Art: The Martin B-26 also wasn't a good candidate for
ditching, either.

No kiddiing. We had 30 seconds before the B-26 dove for the the bottom.
Those
of us who served in B-26's were well aware of that as proven in ditching
tanks.

Arthur Kramer

Proven?!?. I doubt that, 'Estimated' maybe...certainly not
proven.

Art, I don't think that you'd be smart to bet on those 30
seconds. Mind you, you may have 30 hours depending on how the a/c
hit the water among lots of other things.

I've done hundreds of ditching drills where we needed to get an
18 man crew out on the hangar floor carrying their proper items.
We could usually do it but remember that you're doing the testing
in a nice warm lighted hangar, not the middle of the North
Atlantic in a winter gale after the trauma of a night ditching...
--

-Gord.


I think Art may be talking about "one a day in Tampa Bay" not hanger drills.


Exactly.

Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

"George Z. Bush" wrote:


"Gord Beaman" wrote i

It was one of my squadron's aircraft and crews so luckily I
wasn't aboard.

Interesting story. If it happened anywhere between 1960-63, that would have
been my outfit (57th ARSq) that got the mayday and gone out to pick them up and
escort them in to Lajes.

No, actually it was in the early seventies, likely 71 or 72.

We had a pretty big SAR area of responsibility,
roughly 1,000 miles in all directions, so we often found ourselves up near
Iceland looking for guys heading our way who were in trouble.


We knew of your reputation and I can say that it eased our minds
a lot too. You need all the friends that you can get out there.


We had one instance where a guy ferrying a single engine plane (I don't remember
what make it was) to the Middle East for its new owner, a sheik of some sort,
developed engine problems and sent out a mayday. We made radio contact with him
and simultaneously scrambled an HC54, although it was quite late in the day. He
reported that he had passed over a freighter about 30 minutes previously and
said that he didn't think he'd be able to stay aloft until our plane got there,
so we advised him to make a 180 and see if he could locate that vessel while it
was still light and then ditch alongside it, which is exactly what he did.


This sounds very familiar...I'm sure that I read about that
incident somewhere.


The freighter picked him up and deposited him in Galveston Texas a couple of
weeks later instead of the middle East. After we determined that the pilot had
been rescued, we recalled our aircraft. We sent out another flight at daybreak
the following day and, amazingly, we found his abandoned aircraft still afloat
in the Atlantic.

George Z.


That's pretty amazing indeed, a huge bulk oil tanker looks
unbelievably tiny in that absolutely huge expanse of ocean when
seen from altitude. Then as you circle around it while punching
down down down to 'rig it' (photograph and get it's data to
report ashore) it keeps getting bigger and bigger till it's a
huge steel monster spouting smoke from what seems like about a
dozen big stacks, with men scurrying to and fro on the decks
doing god knows what.

You fly along the length of it about 50 feet off the water
snapping photos as you go and with other crewmembers scribbling
it's description rapidly. They all get their heads together and
decide if they have enough info and you either 'rerig' or pork on
climb power and get your butt up to your cruise altitude (usually
around 8,000 feet - an optimum radar altitude).

It's mind-bending to watch all this size and complexity dwindle
as you circle and climb, it keeps shrinking slowly and being
replaced with white-caps till you actually lose sight of it in
all that huge expanse of white cap strewn miles of ocean from
horizon to horizon. Makes one realize how insignificiently tiny
man is.
--

-Gord.

"Tex Houston" wrote in message
...

I have no idea which they used in the movie. I saw it when it first came
out and never since.


A C-82 was used.

"Mike Marron" wrote in message
...

It was a C-119.


No, it was a C-82.

"George Z. Bush" wrote in message
...

Anyway, since I started this thread with an innocent question, in
recognition of
the **** storm it generated, I'm going to claim author's rights to revise
my
question. AIR, we were talking about ditching characteristics, and I
asked what
the manufacturer had to say on the subject.

In those days, before an aircraft hit the inventory, the only people who
knew
how it was going to behave were the manufacturer and his test pilots.
Before
they turned the aircraft over to the military for their acceptance
testing, they
sat down and wrote a flight manual, which contained everything the
operator
needed to know about how to make the bird go up and come back down in one
piece.
Before the first of that model actually ditched in the water somewhere,
its crew
should have familiarized themselves with every bit of the information in
that
manual, including how it was going to behave when it hit the water and
recommendations on how best to make initial contact with the water.


Unless the manufacturer actually ditched the aircraft whatever was written
in the manual was theory.

"Bill Silvey" wrote in message
m...

Mike, Art's rabid partisanship won't let him see past this. If Bush had
been a supply-side democrat, Art would be on the other side of this
argument, no doubt.


A supply-side democrat? That must be exceedingly rare.

Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: "Steven P. McNicoll"
Date: 10/24/03 11:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: t


"George Z. Bush" wrote in message
...

Anyway, since I started this thread with an innocent question, in
recognition of
the **** storm it generated, I'm going to claim author's rights to revise
my
question. AIR, we were talking about ditching characteristics, and I
asked what
the manufacturer had to say on the subject.

In those days, before an aircraft hit the inventory, the only people who
knew
how it was going to behave were the manufacturer and his test pilots.
Before
they turned the aircraft over to the military for their acceptance
testing, they
sat down and wrote a flight manual, which contained everything the
operator
needed to know about how to make the bird go up and come back down in one
piece.
Before the first of that model actually ditched in the water somewhere,
its crew
should have familiarized themselves with every bit of the information in
that
manual, including how it was going to behave when it hit the water and
recommendations on how best to make initial contact with the water.


Unless the manufacturer actually ditched the aircraft whatever was written
in the manual was theory.



Of course once the crew ditched the aircraft threory became practice pretty
friggin fast. Or hadn't that occured to you?
..