Save our Airbase

[sgt_fresh]

 

[352nd_Wheels]

Nicely done. Those Sally's went down quick. ?

 

In the book Baa Baa Black Sheep Boyington stated that the P-40 was supposed to be landed on the main gear and not with a 3 point landing. A 3 point landing caused the P-40 to bounce quite drastically.

Quote

Here at Toungoo, the first week of December 1941, our airplanes were finally ready for action. They were P-40s that had been equipped here in the field in far-off Burma with machine guns, self-sealing gasoline tanks, and armor plate to make them warplanes. Actually these P-40s had been borrowed (lend-lease to Britain) back from our English ally. One hundred of them. Furthermore, that was all the AVG was able to borrow.

 

Shark faces were painted in brilliant color combinations on the natural silhouettes of the P-40 engine cowlings, an idea appropriated from a magazine picture of a P-40 in North Africa.

 

Having never flown before in an aircraft with a liquid-cooled engine, I knew nothing about their manipulation, least of all this airplane doctored up with armor plate behind the pilot’s seat, with guns and ammunition, none of them taken into consideration when it was designed. The pilots who had flown them said these “Shark Fins,” the name the British hung on us, had an unorthodox manner of spinning end over end with their unengineered modifications, and that unless one had sufficient altitude to get them out of a spin it was impossible. They had several tombstones to prove their point.

 

One day, after I had been given a cockpit-checkout by a qualified pilot, I had my first ride. The revised P-40 didn’t feel too strange, considering that I had never flown one before and had been inactive for three months. I didn’t spin it, however, for I believed their story even though I didn’t think it possible.

 

Everything went okay until I came in to touch down for a landing. Having been accustomed to three-point landings in my Marine Corps flying, I tried to set this P-40 down the same way, even though I had been instructed to land this plane on its main gear only. I bounced to high heaven as a result of my stubbornness, and I started to swerve off the runway. So I slammed the throttle on, making a go-around. In my nervousness I had put on so many inches of mercury so quickly that the glass covering the manifold pressure gauge cracked into a thousand pieces. After I had landed in the proper manner on the second try, I was informed in no uncertain words: You can’t slam the throttle around like you did in those God-d@mned Navy air cooled engines.

 

Jim Cross took the same P-40 up after lunch and the engine blew up. When this happened, Jim was lucky to make a wheels-up landing in a nearby rice paddy. Even though Jim wasn’t hurt, I felt very badly about it, as they were forced to use this P-40 for spare parts.

 

This feeling left me shortly when I discovered that I wasn’t the only one, and that even my squadron commander had arranged for spare parts in three P-40’s. One pilot had five American flags painted on his plane, for he had wrecked five P-40’s, which made him a Japanese ace. This became the only way of getting spare parts, as there was to be none shipped from the United States. I suppose it was only human to want somebody besides oneself to supply these parts.

 

Quoted from pages 29 and 30 of the book Baa Baa Black Sheep.

 

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