Thread: Bird Watching

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Originally Posted by rspears

OK, here ya' go Jerry, groups of five, trying it again:

Group three, only two on this one...

Thanks Roger---looks like this camera I got gets some pretty good details--you also can tell that the lighting in the building isn't the best--

wow now that's some serious hp and cool airplane engines. Thanks for posting

Ah yes............R3350s. We didn't always come back to base with 4 spinnin', but a sweet (though over time deafening for us behind the wing) sound.

Just amazing! I just look at the engineering and have to think who thought of that.and who gets to rebuild it, well my sbc scares me no more! well.. maybe a little. Thanx for the pictures.

I'll look thru the pics I took on that last visit and post in a new thread in a day or so--I'll post a link and maybe Roger can do the images again--but will take me a few days to get to it

Jerry

Originally Posted by pat mccarthy

how about the sopwith camel the crank was bolted on the fire wall and the jugs spun around the crank.

Maybe the best known of the rotaries was the "Gnome", a French engine. You can Google "Gnome Rotary Engine" and see what its all about. The gyroscopic effect of all that iron spinning on the front end made for some interesting control problems. I read someplace that no airplane before or since could follow a Camel through a left turn ..... or was it a right turn?

I was privileged (well, make that lucky) enough to see the first test flight of a B36 bomber, and you have to be seriously old to say that. A B29 was flying alongside and a little aft and it looked really dinky. That airplane had its own distinct sound; six Pratt & Whitney R4360 twenty-eight cylinder radials in pusher (backward) configuration.

On a clear day we could see a long peach colored line of big buildings from our farm house, the Consolidated Vultee "bomber plant" in Fort Worth, twenty miles away. They made many, many B24 bombers at that place.

That was in 1946.

A few years ago at Oshkosh three B17's made a low flyover.

Talk about goose bumps!

Jim

When did they add the 4 j47 jet engines?

The J47 were introduced on the D models, which went into service 1951, probably developed year or so earlier.

Jim, here are a couple pics of the bird, and parked next to the B29

Now that's a big bird!

Originally Posted by stovens

Now that's a big bird!

should see the landing gear tires big big big

You can just about see the transition from the B36 to the B52. As a wee tad I do recall seeing several B36's in a very low(1000 feet??) formation pass over.

This is one of the 'birds I always wanted to fly on. When they took off at JFK, they were always far across the airport and had to take off with noise abatement. I was waiting for a flight somewhere at Caracas, Venezuela and one took off down the main runway - noise abatement - nahhhh:

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This was from a museum in the UK about a year after they were retired. I didn't have the SLR with a wide angle lens that day

Oh Boy, Bob, I'm going to enlarge that one and hang it on the wall If I ever get my new shop finished. Thanks.

On the day of that first test flight I rode into town with my Dad, not knowing that we were going to see history being made. We were a couple of miles east of the "bomber plant" and Carswell AFB where the flight took place. We, and a bunch of other rubes, stood around with our mouths open. We probably looked pretty silly but I guess that was justified.

A "36" sat out in the weather unprotected and turning into scrap for years at the old Amon Carter Field. A group acquired it and started restoration but the cost of the project was too much. That, along with the fact that the folks who produced the airplane originally are no longer with us. I volunteered to resurface and polish all the windshield plexiglass parts that were salvageable but plans changed and the need for my services never came up.

I understand that she is now restored and on static display. I forgot where.

Jim

We have the Airline History Museum here in KC, which houses the "Connie" that a group of former TWA guys & gals restored a few years back. It flies over once in a while - a beautiful, beautiful plane painted in the TWA colors.
Airline History Museum at Kansas City

A guy at work loaned me a cd of radial engine sound recordings, awesome.

Missed my exit twice on the way home with the stereo on loud!

Here is a link that has some of the engines being discussed:

Hawker Sea Fury » Aircraft Sound Recordings

Enjoy!