Friday, June 27, 2008

Please, please click on these to enlarge ...

A week ago a friend of mine and I took ourselves off to Paul Allen’s Flying Heritage Museum. He has collected about 15 WW II aircraft, restored them to flying condition, and displayed them in his new museum. A couple of weekends a month, they are flown to keep them in working order. The photo above is a panorama taken inside the museum. The photos below are of some of the more interesting things you’ll see if you go.

One of the things that’s interesting to me is the nose art on these planes. Just below is a caricature of Neville Chamberlin painted on a German Messerschmitt. The German translates roughly to God Punish England. Below Neville is the nose art from a German Rocket plane. It carried only 8 minutes of fuel. It was designed to fly straight up toward bombers overhead firing machine guns. It would race past them on its ascent and then dive past them on the way down again attempting to shoot them down. It had a 50% fatality rate ... which is to say, 50% of its pilots were killed flying it.

Below is a Curtis P-40C Tomahawk ... one of the famous Flying Tigers. It’s interesting because Disney designed the flying tiger fuselage art you see here.

One of the prettiest things in the museum is the propeller on this Curtis Jenny, below.

The Mustang above has 9 kills on its record.

But the record for the most bizarre aircraft has to go to the one below. Germany built V-1 “Buzz Bomb” rockets to attack London. These are similar to today’s cruise missiles but without sophisticated guidance. So even though over 9,000 were fired, only about 5,000 landed anywhere near London. Germany’s answer to better guidance was to put a pilot in them, and fly them over the channel under manual control. When the pilot had them lined up with the target, he would bail out (over enemy territory sure to be captured) and let the plane do the rest. One serious problem!  The cockpit is just in front of the jet intake. As soon as the pilot popped the canopy and started to climb out, he’d be sucked into the engine and killed. These were never successfully flown against London. Duh!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Planes
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