Monday, October 28, 2024

Quite the View


 

8 comments:

  1. Balls of steel or more likely young, dumb, and full of some… no thought of mortality ever entering his mind.

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  2. Silly question. Isn't the tailgunner's field of fire restricted by seating him so deep in the fuselage and close to the tail?
    Al_in_Ottawa

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    Replies
    1. Here is a good article. Scroll down for a photo of rear gunner with "turtleback" retracted--

      https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/curtiss-sb2c-helldiver-big-tailed-beast

      SB2C--aka S.O.B. 2nd class.

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  3. Big ocean-small boat-huge aircraft

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  4. I know it's a dive bomber, but it made me remember the summer of 1979 when I was working as an engineering apprentice in the (now closed) Great Northern Nekoosa paper mill in Millinocket, Maine. This was the summer before I graduated with my degree in Chemical Engineering and I was renting a room from a nice widow named Catherine Feeney, a couple of blocks from one of the 2 employee entrance gates at the mill. My wake up alarm every morning was the sound of Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers taking off from the local air strip, which was a few hundred feet in elevation above the house and flight line on takeoff took the planes pretty much directly over the house I was staying in. The house was on either Knox or Lincoln Street but so much time has passed, I'm not 100% sure anymore. If anyone watches Tucker Carlson, he has interviewed his neighbor at least once - a down to earth Maineiac with last name Feeney. I wondered if he was a relation of the kind lady that rented me the room.

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    Replies
    1. Steve the Engineer. Forgot to put my moniker on the comment.

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    2. And one more edit - neglected to say the torpedo planes were not going off to sink the Japanese Navy, they had been converted to spray pesticide to treat the invasive insects that were killing off the Douglass Fir trees. As I recall there as many as 6 of those beasts in the pesticide air fleet.

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