The Bad Angel

Tucson, Arizona - September 2013

There are some fascinating aircraft in the Pima Air Museum. Their collection is approaching 500 types. The Bad Angel is a P-51 that was piloted by Lt. Louis Curdes. He shot down nine German 109s and an Italian fighter before being shot down himself. He escaped an Italian POW camp and was reassigned to the Pacific where he also got one Japanese kill. One day he saw a wayward C-47 approaching Japanese held Bataan and tried to warn them off. Failing this he shot out both engines of the C-47 and the nurses aboard were rescued after the plane ditched in the ocean. He is the only pilot with German, Italian, Japanese and American kills to his credit...

The Airplane below is my old C-124. I flew 2,800 hours in them crisscrossing the Pacific. One day we took off from Guam heading 1800 miles west to Clark Air Force base in the Philippines. We were doing 200 nautical miles an hour (a nautical mile is about 1.15 real miles). It was another nice day to cross the Philippines Sea. I hum and update my fuel consumption chart. I'm dead reckoning but I can get a sun line every 45 minutes. As the day passes the sun line changes from a speed line to a course line. There is a wall of black clouds ahead. I turn the weather radar up to its maximum range of 100 miles. I see a solid wall 75 miles ahead. The pilot asks if we have enough gas to go back. I tell him no. He wants to know if we can divert North to Taipei. I tell him no way we have enough gas. We are at 8,000 feet. Nobody predicted a typhoon. We press ahead. The night is falling.

As we enter the typhoon wall we hit a severe updraft. The altimeter looks like a clock gone crazy. We are climbing thousands of feet a minute. We pass 16,000 feet and put on our oxygen masks. It's really turbulent. The pilot noses us over into a dive. The airspeed goes from 200 to 450 and hangs there. We're diving and still going up. Blood boils at altitude without a pressure suit...we hit 22,000 feet, still diving, still going up. It's pitch black except for red instrument lights.

The pilots talk to each other. "Holy shit these controls are stiff", one says. Then comes the first downdraft. The combined effects of the downdraft and dive are spectacular. The pilots stop worrying about boiling blood and start to worry about hitting the ocean. They put the plane into a climb. The flight engineer kicks in the superchargers. We go to MAX power. The engines start to overheat and are approaching red lines for heat and RPM. The airspeed drops to 130 and the stall warning klaxon sounds continuously. Still we plummet. We pass 3,000 feet.


This aircraft was old. The wings fell off sometimes in just moderate turbulence. The airplane is climbing and falling and bouncing and shuddering on the thin edge of stalling. The stall warning horn keeps droning. The pilots talk again on the intercom. One says, "Don't lose it.". The other grunts. Oh. Here's another updraft in the nick of time. The cycle repeats again and again.

The B-29 below was the technological wonder of its time, it cost $600,000 a copy, it made for a $3 billion wartime Cadillac investment. The 250 mph jet stream over Japan fouled up plans for the high-altitude bombing. Navigator genius Curtis Lemay stood methods on their head by stripping armament and machine guns and sending in waves of these giants and their children crews with 10-pound incendiaries at night, at 500 feet, to set fire to hundreds of thousands of women, children and old men.

The names of these lovely shining birds included:
• Sentimental Journey
• Laden Maiden
• Liberty Belle
• Uninvited Guest
• American Beauty
• Lethal Lady
• Lucky Strike
• Arson, Inc
• Bad Penny
• Blind Date
• Enola Gay

 A silhouette of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy". Fat Man was designed with a 64-inch diameter girth to fit into the B-29's bomb bay.

Only three of these Columbia X5Cs were built in 1947 due to structural problems. We are leaving the RV in Benson for a week for structural repairs and taking a road trip to southern California.

36 of these Martin PMB-5As were built in 1940.

Three F-107s were built in 1956. They lost out to the F105 which had an internal bomb bay for nuclear missions.

The SR-71 Blackbird could do 2200 MPH at 85,000 feet. I saw one land at dawn in Okinawa in 1966.  Actually, it was the single-seat early model A-12...but the same deal basically...Mach 3 at 80,000 feet...

The Douglas B-18 Bolo came out in 1936. It was obsolete by WWII and was used to detect submarines.

The A-10 Warthog is built around a 30-millimeter cannon that spews 4,200 rounds a minute. It's heavily armored and has a top speed of 380 MPH...

The Grumman F-18 came out in 1974. It has a speed of 1544MPH and a range of 2,400 miles.

F-18 front view.

F4C

B-24

Douglas A-26

B-25

Spitfire

German V-1

F4C

F105 "thud"

C-141

B-52

B-47

B-50

C-124

C-133

C-130

B-25

Mig 15

Allison engine used on the P-38, P-39 and P-40.

B-58

Mig-29 "Fulcrum"

900 Tons of Rotting Tuna

Rockaway Beach, Oregon - July 26, 2009

It was sad when the great ship went down. It was 1976 and Betty M. was fully laden with a cargo of 900 tons of fresh tuna. She capsized in the mouth of the Columbia River. Local residents still talk about the stench that lasted for months. The diving here involves 50-degree water temperatures and 10 to 30-foot visibility. I think I'll leave the SCUBA gear in the basement until we get back to Florida.

This is a picture of the Tillamook Naval Air Station back in 1943. The Navy dirigibles photographed her are only slightly shorter than the 800-foot Hindenburg.

One of Mrs. Phred's online friends came to visit. Her name is Laura. Mrs. Phred and Laura go to "Garibaldi days" and have excellent fried oysters for lunch. I stay home and do paperwork. I'm pleased to be able to load Laura up with fresh fish. She drove a long way to meet Mrs. Phred. Laura works in the Oregon mental hospital where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed starring Jack Nicolson. The book was written by Ken Kesey who got his big start from having his brains jarred loose by the CIA during the MKULTRA project, which involved slipping LSD to unwitting citizens. Kesey's fourth child, conceived with another Merry Prankster, was appropriately named "Sunshine"...
Today we took a three-cape scenic drive along the coast. We both had that deja vu feeling that we'd been here before...perhaps we had. The Tillamook Air Museum is not bad. They had some very nice WWII airplanes and airplane engines on display. My own C-124 engine was there. It was the largest airborne piston engine ever deployed. It was used on the B-36 as well....a radial seven with four rows...28 cylinders...what a hog. 4,500 cubic inches...four engines...no wonder we burned 10,000 gallons of high octane on a ten-hour flight....about five gallons a mile...

The most lovely plane in the museum is a P-38 called the Tangerine.

I don't recognize it at first...light, flighty, lovely and bristling with 50-calibers. The engines rotate in opposite directions to cancel the effects of torque.

Lt. Ethell who flew one this made some kills. The people next to us gave us a plate of freshly boiled crab. It was good but it ruined our appetite for the sockeye salmon I had cooked so I made a sandwich spread from it with eggs, onions, mayonnaise, and chipotle sauce. It made about seven healthy sandwiches.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the air museum was the building housing it. They claim it is the largest wooden building in the world. It's easy to believe. They built it to house Akron Class Navy rigid dirigibles during WWII. They built two, but one burned to the ground about 20 years ago. It had been filled with hundreds of tons of hay. The building that is left houses a bunch of stored boats and RVs in addition to the air museum.

Tomorrow we move on to the mouth of the Columbia where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1805.
I think WWII dirigibles were very useful for convoy duty.


Rotting tuna, Ken Kesey, P-38s, the Merry Pranksters, Chipottle sauce, Project MKULTRA, the CIA, WWII dirigibles, the Oregon coast capes, fresh fish....it all comes together right here in Tillamook. It's interesting that Lt Ethell's son, Jeff Ethell, wrote a book called "Warbirds of WWII" and crashed a restored P-38 and died in Tillamook in 1997. Apparently he lost an engine, failed to maintain a sufficient airspeed and destroyed himself and one of the last of these lovely airplanes in a flat spin.

A Thousand Slimy Things Lived On...and So Did I

Midway -1967-68

Midway Atoll has changed from a source of guano. to a 1930s Pan-Am refueling stop, to a WWII critical battle site, to a Vietnam refueling stop for military aircraft, and then to a U.S bird sanctuary.

There are currently 400,000 nesting pairs of Gooney birds (Albatross) on Midway, about 70% of the world population. The birds arrive in August and stay until late Fall. The mating ritual involves throwing back the head, flapping wings, and yodeling in perfect synchronization for days on end. They are graceful in flight but ofter suffer midair collisions.  They frequently crash and tumble on takeoff rolls and on landing. They won't move from the nest if approached by humans or vehicles.

 Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
An echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine. 

-Pink Floyd

I stayed in this barracks some times after a 10 hour, 2,300 miles, flight from Japan. The Navy was our host and we showered and brushed our teeth in saltwater. I often had diarrhea here and first thought it was the water until someone told me that it came from eating raw snakes and eels days earlier in Okinawa.

The birds have to be in sync because they take turns shielding the nest from the sun, which kills many of the baby chicks every year. Up to 1,000 a day die in the hot sun and are hauled off to the incinerator....it is survival of the fittest...mother nature takes her toll.

Midway was the turning point in the Pacific war. The U.S. sank four Japanese heavy carriers here with great losses of their best pilots and airplanes. Japan never recovered from these losses. U.S. Navy code breakers allowed the Navy to learn the exact date (June 2, 1942) of the attack on Midway and position an inferior force to lie in wait.

For reasons not entirely understood the wandering albatross have a deferred mating pattern and does not return to Midway to mate until they are 8 or nine years old. Recently, a bird tagged in 1958 returned to mate which says something about lifespan.

 

The Breaking of JN-25

Breaking the Japanese code known to Americans as JN-25 was daunting. It consisted of approximately 45,000 five-digit numbers, each number representing a word or phrase. For transmission, the five-digit numbers were super-enciphered using an additive table. Breaking the code meant using mathematical analysis to strip off the additive, then analyzing usage patterns over time, determining the meaning of the five-digit numbers. T

AF Is Short of Water
In the spring of 1942, Japanese intercepts began to make references to a pending operation in which the objective was designated as "AF." To alleviate any doubt, in mid-May the commanding officer of the Midway installation was instructed to send a message in the clear indicating that the installation's water distillation plant had suffered serious damage and that freshwater was needed immediately. Shortly after the transmission, and intercepted Japanese intelligence report indicated that "AF is short of water." Armed with this information, Nimitz began to draw up plans to move his carriers to a point northeast of Midway.

The Gooney Bird's long wings are ill-suited to powered flight and most species lack the muscles and energy to undertake sustained flapping flight. Albatrosses in calm seas are forced to rest on the ocean's surface until the wind picks up again. 

I logged 2,800 hours of flying time at this C-124 navigator's station.  There is a lot of primitive WWII era gear here, including the APN-9 Loran A oscilloscope and a crappy radar. The best navigation aid was a dead reckoning, followed by the bubble sextant.

The maximum takeoff weight of a C-124 is 197,000 pounds. Once, one of my pilots, wanting to fly 3,300 miles to Tacoma, had the empty airplane refueled to 110 percent of the allowable maximum weight. We took off in the pre-dawn darkness, lumbering slowly to the very end of the runway and lifting off into the darkest night I can remember about five feet above the ocean. It took what seemed forever to get high enough that dipping a wing into the water was no longer a possibility.

 When taking off, albatrosses need to take a run-up to allow enough air to move under the wing to provide lift.

The C-124 was designed for 5,000 hours of flight time but often hit 50,000. It had the largest piston-driven engines ever mounted on an airplane. The wings developed cracks and sometimes broke off in heavy turbulence. The last one was retired from the National Guard in 1974.

Gooney birds have been recorded flying non-stop over 4,000 miles to find food for the chicks. It's possible that the strenuous mating dance, which lasts for days, is a survival mechanism. The birds have to each be fit enough to share gathering food and sheltering the nest for months.

Above is a picture of Midway on December 7, 1941, after a sneak attack.

The picture below is the flight engineer's station on the C-124. They would do things like throws the levers to kick in the superchargers if we had to climb above 8,000 feet to get over a mountain range.

When a bird first returns to the colony it will dance with many partners, but after several years the number of birds an individual will interact with drops, until one partner is chosen and a pair is formed. They then continue to perfect an individual dance language that will eventually, be unique to that one pair and last for life.

Young Phred Firecloud, the navigator.

Midway Atoll is about 1,200 miles from Hawaii. The atoll was formed about 28 million years ago by a volcano. The atoll is over the same hot spot that formed the Hawaiian Islands. The volcano gradually sank under its own weight, but the coral growth kept the atoll above water. This subsidence process is called an isotonic adjustment. The atoll was claimed by Captain Middleton for the U.S. in 1859 under the 1856 Uninhabited Island Guano Act.

Things change fast on the human scale of time, from the Battle of Midway to a bird sanctuary in my lifetime.

And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work 'em woe:

For all averred, I had killed the bird

That made the breeze to blow.

Ah, wretch! said they, the bird to slay,

That made the breeze to blow!

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I. 

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Coleridge