Also did not Howard Hughes race a very similar looking plane? Just smaller? ( Something about “Texaco” )
I tried to stay away from recommending planes I have no personal experience with.
My Dad always said that the
B-17 was super easy to fly, was like J-3 Cub.
B-24 flew OK but you had to be careful when slow.
B-25 & A 26 flew like what they were.
B 26 Marauder was a pilots plane, not for the new or rash pilots.
Worst on looks was the A 20 Havoc but was a joy to fly and more enjoyable that anything other than fighters.
But that was his opinion.
You got to remember that a ‘Funk’ with a inverted, converted Ford model A engine was his first personal A/C.
Mine was an 85 HP 1946 Globe Swift. The only airplane that in a full power vertical dive was still behind the power curve.
For me, the easiest plane to fly was a Stinson 10A. You could be flying along, put on a blind fold, chop the power and it would on it’s own go find a grass strip or grass airport and make a perfect 3 point landing then wait for you to wake up and to go to parking. Of all the Stinson A/C that model was the only one I really liked to fly. They all looked like ruptured ducks to me so no pretty points for them. IMO
Yes, the Northrop Gamma. looks like an airplane is supposed to look like. But, give it a big round engine & a tail wheel and I am automatically interested.
I love the look of the WWII-era “flying wings,” like the Northrop YB-35. My understanding was that they were difficult to control, and that the concept was only fully realized once computer-aided control surfaces were developed (e.g., the B-2).
If you’re referring to the Northrop Gamma, yes, Hughes did fly one, making a transcontinental run in 9 hours, 26 minutes, and 10 seconds, according to Wikipedia.
But Hughes also built a separate, proprietary plane called the H-1 Racer, which set the world speed record; this plane seems to share some design characteristics with the Northrop Gamma.
When I was in high school (1950) a local inventor decided that the main contributor to drag on racing aircraft was the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. So, he designed and built a Goodyear Racer with long thin surfaces, like rocket fins in place of the empennage. Our local paper, the Alameda Times Star, gave a running account of the build, transport to a hangar at the Oakland Airport and of the delays in flight testing. When the craft finally got airborne, the paper reported:
‘…accelerated down the runway and climbed to about 75 feet altitude before it gave up the idea of flying.’
One aircraft that was ungainly as fuck but flew like a dream (according to Jack Lamb, who I met while in Air Cadets in Gimli) was the Bellanca Aircruiser he owned. I was supposed to get a ride but the Cadet OC wouldn’t let us go. Miserable Bastard.
That reminds me of the CL-84 “Dynavert”. It is kind of a shame it never landed contracts the way it should have. The Marines could have had their Ospreys during the Vietnam War.
This reminds me of the James Stewart film “No Highway in the Sky,” in which a scientist working for an aircraft manufacturing company claims that a new plane model would fail from metal fatigue after a certain number of flight hours. The film came out in 1951, the Comet came out in 1952 and started having problems with metal fatigue. Of course, the movie was about a propeller driven plane, but the coincidence is interesting.
I have to say, I thought I was fairly up to speed on aircraft but this thread is coming up with lots of examples I’d never heard of before, this being one of them, thank you
Curiously, I’ve read that the B-26 Marauder had the lowest wartime casualty rate among American bombers. So if you survived training, you were better off in a Marauder during the actual fighting. I’m not sure why, though.
You’re welcome.
To be fair, most examples of Canadian aviation have been overshadowed by the US. Canadair and Dehavilland made some pretty spectacular airplanes over the years, the Caribou/Buffalo, Cl-215/415, and a lot of bush planes (Beaver, Otter, etc. Most of these aren’t “pretty” but fly really well within their design envelope.
Lumpy: The Dynavert was a lot smaller than the Osprey but for ferrying troops and a gun platform it would have worked well with the Hueys… and I’m guessing a bigger, badder version would have come along.
This was more similar to the Osprey. And it was in fact designed as a replacement for the CH-37, a large helicopter that was used in Vietnam. It could probably have been developed further into a successful aircraft, but the design was not pursued beyond the prototype stage.
It’s kind of obligatory to cite the 1964 movie The Starfighters [IMDB details/complete movie, MST3k’d of dashing young pilots one of whose father, fictionally, is a congressman. It’s basically an Air Force helps Hollywood for a funding request, starring a future real-life congressman, which amusingly his IMDB bio considers not worth noting.
Flying characteristics varied among B-26 models (early ones had the worst reputation) but overall the accident rate in continental US, so a general proxy for training, as follows, per 100,000 flight hours, as given in ‘USAAF Statistical Digest World War II’. B-17 30, B-24 35, B-25 33, B-26 55, A-20 131, A-26* 57, P-38 139, P-39 245, P-40 188, P-47 127, P-51 105.
So the B-26 had a high rate for bombers proper, though not compared to the A-20, a smaller twin engine bomber in layman’s terms but w/ single pilot and in the ‘attack’ category in WWII USAAF parlance, and nothing compared to the more accident prone fighters.
The combat loss rate of the B-25 and B-26 were similar, and both much lower than the B-17 and B-24 which were also similar, around .7% per sortie for mediums to 1.6% for heavies. That’s basically because the heavies encountered more opposition on their deeper mission in general. The big volume use of mediums in Europe was against areas of occupied Europe the German fighter force had largely abandoned and flak that wasn’t up to the standards within the Reich either. Then fighters also suffered more accidents in combat use as they did in training, and also tended to get within reach of light AA guns when used in ground attack which mediums less often did. Some medium bomber missions were extremely dangerous and some heavy bomber and fighter missions were ‘milk runs’, but in general that’s why it was lucky in terms of survival prospects as a rule to be assigned to medium bombers. It wasn’t the particular characteristics of the B-26, generally (its better speed got it out of trouble in a few cases v Japanese fighters that could more easily catch a B-25).
Haha, yeah that one is notorious. (Not to get too political, but as an aside, I like Bob Dornan - though I don’t agree with him politically - for giving it to Newt Gingrich but good, and also for participating in King’s March on Washington at a time when it was risky, to say the least, for a young white military officer to do so.)
The “B-26” is the “pretty but allegedly dangerous to fly” airplane we were discussing.
Another data point: one of the other nicknames of the B-26 was the “Baltimore whore”, because Martin’s main plant was in the Baltimore area and, like a whore, the B-26 was pretty, fast-looking, and had no visible means of support (i.e., nobody understood how that aircraft could fly).
