P-40 found in the Sahara
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/11/11655018-world-war-ii-kittyhawk-fighter-found-in-sahara-shedding-light-on-pilots-fate?lite

I have a book called "The Lady Be Good" about a WW II bomber lost in the war and found later in the 50's in Tunisia...Lowell Thomas did a special on the discovery, and they actually found all the remains...The plane pancaked in after the crew bailed out and was in remarkable condition...  

They say you can still see tank tread tracks in the sand left by Rommel's Panzers...  

Du-d-dupe!

I remember a book or show about a b29 or 17 that landed
In Greenland at the  end of the war , out of fuel.
They found ten years or so ago, drilled a hole in the ice and brought it
Up piece by piece. With a little oil, the 50cal would still fire

Cool.

SOunds like a version of the apocryphal 'Corvette found walled up in cellar' story but I'd love for it to be true. Stranger things have happened I guess, and they did find some military Harleys like that awhile back IIRC. If you'd find anything like that it'd likely be in Burma.

There were also some P-38s in pack ice somewhere. The ice had beat them up pretty bad, thawing and refreezing etc. I think they brought one up and spent years and mucho dinero restoring it. Even so, it was considered a real find, since they ain't any others to be had.

"glacier girl" is the P38 they recovered from about 250 feet of ice. It is one of twenty-four that survive and they have added to the six others that are flyable for the cost of about 3 million.

Damn good thing Algore was right about global warming, otherwise they would have had to drill down 500 feet, wot?

The B-29 was "Kee Bird" and lost on Greenland in 1947.  Recovery attempt in 1994 ended in disaster when the APU broke loose during taxi, causing a fire that destroyed the aircraft.  

Kee Bird Wikipedia

I almost cried when the Kee Bird burned. After all the blood sweat and tears those guys went through, to lose it so close to the end. I just kept repeating " this can't happen, this can't happen. But it did.

The local air museum has a P61 Black Widow that they recovered and are restoring to flying condition. It is one of four that survive and will be the only one in flying condition when it's done. They also do the WW2 weekend every year the first weekend of June if you're near Reading,PA it's worth the trip.

In reading about them some more I guess they made 706 total of them so four isn't too bad. One of them is on display in Beijing though
Here's the link to the story

and what she'll look like


Thanks mods for letting this go a little off topic

Slightly different article about the P-40 in North Africa:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/898787-world-war-ii-fighter-kittyhawk-p-40-frozen-in-the-desert-for-70-years

I don't know how to explain this exactly.  It was 1942 in the Sahara, and he got lost.  One square mile of sand out there looks just like every other square mile of sand.  There was no GPS in 1942.  There were no pocket emergency beacons.  There were no satellite phones.  There was no seamlessly intertwined network of communications.

Aircraft radio communications at that time did not carry hundreds of miles, they were relatively short-range, especially from makeshift desert bases.  His radio would not have the range to reach a settlement, and back at that time the people in those settlements would not have even known what the Hell a radio was.

In the desert, they had to truck or fly their fuel and provisions in to the base to start with; there was no Sunoco station around the corner.  If one poor guy got lost there was not enough supplies to justify an all-out search and rescue mission.  Besides... if they found him, there would be very few options to get him.  You can't land a plane on soft sand and take off again.  Heli-ma-choppers were a few years off still.  You'd have to travel overland and that would take several days if he was 200 miles out.  Hell a truck would probably break down twice in that distance.  I think after looking at it like this, as grim as it sounds... it was logistically impossible in 1942 to rescue him.  He was doomed when he got lost.

If you got lost over the desert you were pretty much screwed.

There was evidence that the "Lady be Good" B24 crew thought they were still over the Mediterranean Sea when they bailed out, that's how screwed up their navigator got.  They dropped with their life raft and saltwater survival gear and left all their desert survival stuff in the airplane.

Life in 1942 was less forgiving than you realize.

I love stuff like this, and I've never heard of that particular plane. I'm about to watch the episode of that now. I do remember watching a NatGeo or Discovery channel show about the Glacier Girl a few years back, and I loved it. All of the original members of the team could no longer afford the project, so they sold it off to an investor who completed it. There are still a few more up there, along with a B-17.

Lady Be Good Quartermaster Foundation web page, one of several out there.

Anyone recall a case of a downed WWII plane, Spitfire most likely, that was found in an English swamp some time ago? The Polish pilot was still at the controls IIRC. I swear that this was in the news within the lasts dozen years or so. Memory may be playing tricks though.

My search skills are failing me here.

Thanks for the great pic. The main protagonist in my current work in progress was a former P61 Black Widow pilot flying for Elliot Roosevelt doing recon in North Africa and Sicily - shot down over Sicily. I'm in the editing stage, but am having a hard time getting anything done at this point - it's too easy to work on the next book rather than edit the current one. Pictures like this remind me to get back to work. (Hard when you work 60 hrs a week construction.)

Did anyone save those hi-res photos of the P-40 from Jakub Perka's photo site?  

I had them up in my browser for a few days but then they were deleted from his photobucket account.

If you saved them, send me an IM.

Thanks.

You know, it occured to me just now how great this is. I mean, the moderators here let us have quite a bit of latitude, perhaps because there is no other appropriate place on the site for discussions like this. I think threads like this are important because 'retro' is more than just building old rifles, it's done out of respect for those veterans who served, and I would have to say this entire forum is based around that entire idea.

I understand people building what they carried in Iraq or what SOF carries for the same reason, but to me threads like this are tributes, and having people who were there, giving us valuable information that will at the very least be archived somewhere. It's interesting to me on a historical basis, and I think of this forum as 'The Museum' in a way. Know what I mean? I learn something new and interesting here every week. We aren't just building rifles, we're 'reconstructing history'.  Thanks go to our mods and the powers that be on this forum for giving us a little room to breathe. It's appreciated.

I think that the mods let us run a little because things never get too out of control or disrespectful like they do sometimes in GD. There are often interesting things on there as well including the first I heard of this P-40.

Morg, I should be seeing her in her current state of repair the first weekend of June so I will shoot you some current photos for some more motivation! I am really a WW2 aviation buff and last year I took a ride on the B17 and this year I am debating between the B24, B25 or the B29 but I may just be cheap and go with the Texan instead. The 17 was an awesome experience though and the thought of ten guys crammed on that plane, which is much smaller than you would think, all in their cold weather gear and fighting for their lives. Balls of steel!

The P-61 was really a cool plane that you don't hear much about. Here are some gratuitous pics of others

The best seat in the house for takeoff!

Ahh, yessss. The good old Commemorative Airforce. Amazing that they are still flying all that old iron.

+1!

Maybe a year or two ago I hear some loud droning piston engines flying around the neighborhood.  I didn't think much of it because living on the doorstep of Eglin AFB one hears and sees everything you can imagine.

Well the drone just kept on and on and finally I went out to investigate.  It was a CAF B-17 and 2 Liberators flying circle patterns at low level over the area.  I ran a few houses down to where my 80 year old mother lived and made her come outside and see this stunning sight knowing she'd probably never have the oppurtunity again to see the fruits of "her" generation.

I hope to see old FiFi someday.  That is a beautiful bird.

The summer before the Liberty Belle B-17 burned I was fortunate enough to see it do a low pass over a house I was at.  We were helping someone move and heard engines droning, managed to get outside just as it flew a couple hundred feet above us.

I also got a chance a few years before that to be at the end of the run way (behind a fence) when the Liberty Belle took off.  Close enough that my hair was moving from it.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to crawl through a B17. Now at 5'3" I am not overly large and I had trouble getting around in it so how did those WWII crews in cold weather flying gear get around in them?

They are amazingly small inside and I wondered the same thing at 5'8" and 180lbs in shorts and a t-shirt! They also had the top turret parts removed that would limit access even more into/out of the cockpit. It would be a death sentence trying to bail out of one of them that was falling out of control out of the sky!

The only station that I was not able to get to was the tailgunner one (it was closed) and as much as I would have liked to get back there I don't think I would have liked it or that damn ball turret!

They are amazingly small aren't they?  Just last year a longtime family friend died- I had known him as long as I'd been alive.  In WWII he worked for Grumman on Long Island before he got drafted.   His job, because he was so small, was to paint the interior of the wings with zinc chromate.  He said the inspectors had mirrors on long poles and would inspect behind every strut(?) and if they found he had missed a part he had to go in and spray it all over again.  No mask, no goggles, all day every day.  Later when he was drafted he said the Army in its infinite wisdom made him a BAR Gunner despite him being one of the smallest guys in his unit. He hated the BAR...  RIP Irv.