Apparently the Air Transport Auxilliary always three pointed the heavies (Lancaster, Halifax and Stirling) whereas the RAF always wheeled them on.
I remember reading a book by a WW2 RAF or RCAF heavy pilot, in which he discussed his reasons for preferring one sort of landing or the other, and his colleagues' stong preference for the other. This debate has been going on for many decades.
The Ju52/3M transport Pilot's Notes specified that the aircraft should be wheeled on as three pointing it when fully loaded would put unacceptable strain on the fuselage.
I am certainly no authority, but I have read similar things about other transport aircraft (C-46? C-47? Can't remember).
BTW, if you like the Ju52, you owe it to yourself to beg, borrow or steal a copy of Martin Caidin's book,
The Saga of Iron Annie (1979).
Partly excerpted from "You Have To Learn The Ropes"
by Milt Salamon:
The wingwalk, on Iron Annie, a 50-year-old tri-motor Junkers Ju-52, set a world record on Nov. 14, 1981.
Nineteen skydivers kneeled, crouched or stood on the wing of the German bomber-type craft that Martin Caidin owned at the time."All nineteen were outside of the airplane for at least a minute, held on by a rope," he told us.
Rope? "We tied it around the wing and the fuselage. The jumpers used it to pull themselves out of the airplane against high winds, to assume correct positions on the wing, and to keep from being blown off.
The insanity - Martin calls it "A challenge...engineering and pilot-wise and personal" - began almost a year earlier "When we were beating up the countryside with a bunch of war birds and we put in at Palatka and did some jumping there," he later told an interviewer. "The talk got around to wing walking." An idea was born.
"We approached the record slowly and carefully," Martin insisted. For almost four months, "We hunted all over for special rope and we found Pigeon Mountain Industries in Georgia with a rope that had only 2 percent stretch and an 11,000-pound test strength. On our early tests with regular nylon rope it stretched by 40 percent and we had guys hanging on for dear life all over the wing."
That Nov. 14, "We flew over Palatka, our designated drop zone. I started the final run at 9,000 feet. Soon, half a dozen guys went onto the wing to block the wind for others, he said."My first real big surprise was a sudden severe yaw of the nose to the left. I kicked right rudder hard as I could and she came around. Our speed went to 140 mph indicated and she put her nose down as that gang kept pouring out on the wing - and, just like that, she went through 2,000-, 3,000-, then 4,000-feet-a-minute rate of descent. And then the shaking went wild. . . The left wing was twisting, you could see it flexing like mad, and the right wing was drumming like a washboard, and then we got this terrific KABOOM! KABOOM! sound . . .she was trying to roll over on her back.
"There we were, coming out of the sky at nearly 200 mph and over 4,000 feet a minute. I didn't think the airplane was going to stay together . . . My head was slamming into the top of the cockpit. I almost hit the smoke switches as the signal to bail out, and I was yelling for them to get the hell off my airplane.
"I glanced at the left wing and it was twisting and rippling and then I heard crew chief Bill Tharp yelling on the radio, `They're going!' He meant the jumpers and not the wing, and as fast as they were spilling off that wing, things were smoothing out and suddenly we were back in the real world with a docile airplane, coming downstairs like a bat out of hell, but smooth.
"And we'd done it!"
This is not the way that I would treat such an old airplane; but I am
far more conservative than Martin Caidin was!