Originally Posted by
tdracer
Memory says that when I took my ride, the guns were wooden mock-ups which would weigh a small fraction of the 'real thing'. and only one had an ammunition belt. There were a few 'bombs' in the bomb bay, but just a few - not a full load. Granted, that was ~20 years after you flew it and Nine-O-Nine had been repaired a couple times during that interval.
I think we had typical sightseeing/ferry weights of 52,000 lbs and recall thinking at the time that it was just about twice a DC-3 weight on just about twice the power, although we never used the highest permissible manifold pressure-I think owing to the detonation considerations but certainly for the reliability factors too.
Perhaps after the runway overrun in ‘87 they lightened the ship a bit. The expander tube brakes wouldn’t quite stop you if you applied them much above 60kts on the landing roll, and there was some joking back then about not being able to jettison load over suburban Pittsburgh if the going got tough. The bomb bay doors were locked shut in fact.
The b-roll shows a powerplant in the quonset hut with a feathered prop.