NFR B-17 Bomber

[iveofione]

I was at Chanute for 18 months of tech school eleven years after you.
I remember some miserable winter mornings marching down the flight line from the chow hall to the classroom.

We got some great training in those tech schools! What a bargain compared to graduating from college today with enormous student debt. We got free training, were fed, housed, got paid and were discharged ready to take on life and be successful. Not a bad deal.....

 

[Phil K]

There was a cool airshow at the Santa Barbara airport a few years ago. We (including my mom, then in her late 80's) got to walk through a B-24 Liberator, down the narrow catwalk between the bomb bays.
There was a guy there who had piloted one during WWII, when he was probably about 20 years old. He described an incident when one of the crew slipped walking down the catwalk and ended up hanging off the exposed control cables running down the inside of the fuselage. It was only because they noticed that the controls were responding poorly and went back to check out the problem that they found and retrieved the guy.

 

[up2nogood]

Daylight bombing raids over Germany were certainly jeopardy but being a ball turrent gunner was double jeopardy! Just about every short guy in a crew was condemned to that assignment. Almost 40% of all B-17's were shot down making the Air Force the branch of service with the most lives lost during the war.

The whole deal was the British were taking such a beating , the US took over the daylight bombing , and the British did the nighttime . Yes we took a beating also . From what I know about the ball turret gunner ,his live expectancy was 1-2 missions . From the stories my uncle told about the missions , the German Luftwaffe fighter planes would attack from underneath to first take out the ball turret gunner . But what he said the most frightening , was not the Luftwaffe , but the flax they put up against them , apparently it did the most damage ,and took out those B-17's . The one plane , and I don't remember the whole sequence of events of the two planes he flew his missions with , the one mission where they lost most of the crew , some bailed out , some were killed in the plane , that plane had over 700 bullet holes in it , and made it back . The B-17 was an amazing aircraft .