Thread: The Ford Aeroplane.

Tweet

Just got this as an e-mail.
Interesting!
(Have the sound on.)


The Ford Airplane.

The footage of this old film is truly amazing, and you have to give the Ford Motor Co. a lot of credit for building these planes, and the Pilots that flew them were gutsy guys to fly them for the first time. A real piece of history. This was 6 months BEFORE Pearl Harbour!

Henry Ford was determined that he could mass produce bombers just as he had done with cars, so he built the WillowRun assembly plant in Michigan and proved it. It was the world's largest building under one roof at the time. This film will absolutely blow you away, one B-24 every 55 minutes and Ford had their own pilots to test them.

ADOLF HITLER HAD NO IDEA THE U.S. WAS CAPABLE OF THIS KIND OF MANUFACTURING EXPERTISE.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/iKlt6rNciTo?rel=0

That's a piece of history many know nothing about, and another is that with that mass of flying machines being produced, needing to be moved from factory to front lines, ferrying services later to become the WASP's (Women Airforce Service Pilots) were approved, and women flight crews took over the testing and delivery duties, along with towing target drones for training anti-aircraft gunners - talk about a high stress flying job! Each woman pilot & crew member freed up a man for active duty service, and started the tradition of female service members.

Talking about the WASPs-----------On one of my flights, had a fairly young co pilot, some of the passengers were WASPS on the way to a reunion--a couple stopped by the cockpit to look in at all the new gaddiict? coplilot said something (I didn' hear it all) but HER remark was hilarious and was something like "Sonny,I spent more time solo in B29s flying across the North Atlantic than you--------




Was turely honored to have met some of these fabulous ladies and also the Tusky guys

Originally Posted by jerry clayton

Talking about the WASPs-----------On one of my flights, had a fairly young co pilot, some of the passengers were WASPS on the way to a reunion--a couple stopped by the cockpit to look in at all the new gaddiict? coplilot said something (I didn' hear it all) but HER remark was hilarious and was something like "Sonny,I spent more time solo in B29s flying across the North Atlantic than you--------




Was turely honored to have met some of these fabulous ladies and also the Tusky guys

Don't want to hijack this but Jerry the last time I flew into Atlanta was on a 717 which is what Boeing named the DC-9 when they bought out McDonnell Douglas. I was commenting on some of the changes though it was still a DC-9 to me. The young co-pilot informed me that it was a 717 and I informed him that I had probably worked on more of them than he had flown, over 500.

If I read that correctly, the plant was established before WWII. A high capacity bomber plant fully established before WWII. Interesting that...

I'm always looking for dots to connect.

Originally Posted by firebird77clone

If I read that correctly, the plant was established before WWII. A high capacity bomber plant fully established before WWII. Interesting that...
I'm always looking for dots to connect.

It was established before the US joined the war, which was precipitated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the war was already widely engaged.

Originally Posted by firebird77clone

If I read that correctly, the plant was established before WWII. A high capacity bomber plant fully established before WWII. Interesting that...

I'm always looking for dots to connect.

More dots to connect...for every plane that was churned out of Henry's plant, someone had to crew it. So for every plane, someone, somewhere, had to provide the necessary people to man it, at the rate of one crew every 55 minutes.
So there had to be tutors in sufficient numbers to educate the flying personnel, the ground crew to maintain the aircraft, someone to feed them, someone to build and maintain the landing facilities...the logistics are mind blowing...

The Ford V8 Times had an article (across several issues) that told about the Ford plant and building the bombers. Ford built a plane in something like 10% of the man-hours that the airplane folks did.....they also invented tooling that, for instance, did the drilling of the wing attachment locations so all planes could accept any wing....a unique idea at the time. Ford built airplane "kits" that were essentially a crate airplane that could be assembled overseas....another novel idea. The Ford bomber plant was a huge scheduling task....even getting people to and from their work stations was a task. I read that street cars would arrive bringing people for a shift and would empty to be filled by the previous shift going home. This airplane was all done on paper....zero computers but probably lots of carbon paper.....no Xerox machines either. Ford embarrassed the airplane folks, they had poo'd the idea of Ford even being able to build an airplane.