Any flying afficionados out there? In authoring a book about the Kassel Mission, I came upon a passage on piloting a damaged B-24 that might be of interest. Here’s the context.
My father was on his 8th mission over Germany with the 445th Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force flew on 27 September 1944. The ensuing battle wiped out all but six of 35 Liberator bombers.
At one point, five enemy fighters had been on his tail. His gunners shot down two of them. Then the American fighters arrived and pulled off the rest in a wild dogfight.
Miraculously still in the air, immediatel y after the battle, Dad and his copilot observed gas spilling from a large hole in the wing behind the #3 (right inboard) engine.
His copilot went back to assess the condition of the plane and crew in the rear of the plane and returned with a sobering report: there was a three-foot hole in the side of the plane at the waist, causing the plane to “shudder and shake.” He already knew loose pedal action that they had a seriously damaged tail (rudders and elevator). In fact, the tail turret had been blown out, and the cables running from the pedals back to the tail were shredded, some hanging by a thread. All three of his gunners in back were wounded, two of them completely down.
Up to this point, he had tried to keep up with the few planes left in the sky, but the plane was shaking so badly, it was only a matter of time before it would fall apart. Going slower might reduce the vibration, so he dropped out of formation.
I was interviewed him for several years before he passed. Here he describes what it was like to pilot that plane right after notifying the lead ship that he was dropping out:
“Immediately, I cut our speed to 150, pulling back the throttles and working the toggles controlling the rpm’s, then synchronizing the engines to balance at the new air speed. (The throttle knobs moved forward and back, each on a shaft that came out of a rounded base.)
“I cut the manifold pressure back to thirty-five inches (less air and gasoline mixture going into the engines) and the propeller rpm down to 2100 or less to conserve fuel and started the letdown. The undercast was at about 3, 000 feet, and we were at 19,000 feet. As we dropped down to 11,000 feet, we [would] take off our oxygen masks.
“Both my feet were on the rudders, my gloved hands on the wheel. I could feel on these big sliding rudder pedals—through which you normally couldn’t feel anything—I felt all kinds of vibration, and through the wheel I could feel the vibration of the ailerons. The ailerons were okay, actually, but it was the elevator—The wheel controls the ailerons on the wings and the elevators on the tail surface up or down. The rudders, which are vertical, are controlled by your feet—I felt a lot of shaking through both my hands and feet, which you would normally never feel. I locked the throttles in at that manifold pressure. If you did it any less than that, you could drop down precipitously. We wanted to maintain our air speed at about 150-155; I didn’t want to slow down to a stall.
“There wasn’t much to say. We observed every once in a while that it [the gasoline] was splashing out. We tried to keep it straight and level as best as we could so it wouldn’t come out more.
“There’s always some turbulence, even without clouds. Above 3,000 feet, it was clear. There were no clouds. But there was turbulence. You just fly through it. You always have to be constantly on the controls because you can always have an updraft or a downdraft. Constantly correcting for what the air is doing— ‘constantly flying the plane.’
“To synchronize the engines, you visually looked at the propellers and watched for a shadow that rotated one way or the other. You toggled back and forth on the four little shafts with two fingers, which controlled the pitch of the propellers and the rpm, to stop the shadow. (Each of the four engines had three propellers that moved at once on one toggle.) Then you looked at the other side and made that shadow stop.
“Finally, you listened to the engines and evened out the roaring and surging between the pair on the left against the pair on the right. So I moved One and Two together against Three and Four, moving the pairs back and forth until they balanced themselves out and the surging roar became an even hum.
“I trimmed the ailerons and rudders as best as I could by using trim tab controls to the left of the pilot’s seat. This relieved the pressure and effort on the pilot and copilot in flying the plane.
“We had a regular compass, and then there was a directional compass that you could actually set. It was much easier to read. I kept that as much as possible on the course Colgate gave me every fifteen minutes. That was modified each time depending on our position after they took a bearing on us.”
It will be a while before this book is ready to send to my agent, but I will share passages here and there that might be of interest as I come upon them in the meantime.