How did they know it was a Twin and not a "Quad"...
...in the known vicinity of a crashed B-17... Cazalet33 asks....
On the website and on this thread, I have stated that the patrol Lieutenant, Ken Backhouse, saw the airframe and it had one engine on wing... the other engine being on the ground 30 yards away. That makes it a Twin.
I agree it is pretty thick in there, vision in some parts is five feet.... in fact it is the 2nd worst Jungle I have been into out of the Malay Jungle, the Borneo Jungle, and even a Moss forest does not compete... the Singapore one up the Bukit Mandai in 1966 being the worst I have been into, but that one has been fixed by applying a Housing Estate....
I saw what remains of the Captain Harl Pease B-17 in the year 2000 after it was re-discovered by the local Pomio people in the employ of the Open Bay Timber Co.. It has no engines fitted upon the two remaining inboard nacelle stubs on the Centre Wing section (No's 2 & 3 positions) The Port and Stbd. Intermediate wing sections are missing (which carried the No's 1 & 4 engines), as are the Port and Stbd Outer Wing panels. There are no Wright Cyclone engines in the vicinity of the main wreckage. One Cyclone was in the Mumus River (now gone) and one Outer Wing panel lies in the Mumus River Valley as does the complete empennage. There is no Cockpit section, it broke off at the production joint and it was found in 1947 but I do not know where.
So we are back to an unpainted, all-metal twin-engined aircraft without any military insignia with a Wasp engine off-wing and another engine on-wing.
Are there any suggestions that anyone can make as to what that aircraft could be ?
I myself have searched for a legitimate answer to this question of an aircraft with R-1340 S3H1's and the only one that comes close (besides an Electra 10E) is the Boeing 247 of which some civilian examples were seconded into Military service in WWII and these had a mix of S1H1 and AN-1 engines. None were sent to New Guinea and if they had been they would be camo painted with military insignia and even then unlikely to be sent anywhere near to Rabaul.
Last edited by David Billings; 17th Feb 2018 at 23:37.