Danny
As we sit in our on-line crew room, Baby Burco gurgling in the background and cup of coffee and biscuit in hand, can I ask your advice please?
A friend lent me a book with a small section on aircraft recognition - I was intigued because I'd never come across the aircraft described. Two in particular were particularly noteworthy - an American USAAC trainer and a British bomber that saw service in the Far East. So Danny, given that you trained in America and later saw service in the Far East you are doubtless familiar with both - so give me your observations do!
The first is a Harley-Fairfax K-55 Air-Pal Trainer.
“You can’t send those nineteen kids up in a crate like” that bandied the wags whenever a near score of student pilots filed aboard this controversial Army Air Corps ship in the late Thirties; and as the Senate hearing later confirmed, they were chillingly close to the truth. The 19 neophytes could be sent up, all right; it was a matter of how suddenly and how violently they came back down. Trouble started with the pilot and worked its way back to the man at the rear. Conceived as an economical flying trainer, the Air-Pal was so economical that it lacked any intercom system among instructor and pupils. No problem in a two or even three-seater — but with 19 sets of controls? Elaborate pre-briefings, hand signals, screaming — all were tried but all fell short of the desired result, unanimity of action, as in “Bank left!” Happily for all concerned, a further economy move halted production altogether only five months after it began. But those who flew or tried to fly her are not likely to ever forget this stillborn regent of the cloud lanes — memories shared by those on the ground lucky and sharp-eyed enough to catch a necessarily brief glimpse of an Air-Pal cart-wheeling across the sky while 19 plucky, if somewhat perplexed students tried outguessing one another, their teacher and fate itself.
The second is the Humbley-Pudge Gallipoli Heavyish Bomber.
Lewis gun blazing, flour bags cascading down, the pachydermic Gallipoli terrorised practice target ranges across the empire from 1933 to 1939. Four Varley “Panjandrum” motors screwed her up to a cruising altitude several feet over the legal minimum of the day. Relatively few were built, but more than enough Gallipolis were delivered to the R.A.F. which handed them over to the Royal Indian Air Force, which in turn handed them over to the Royal Malayan Air Force, which promptly found itself plagued by wholesale desertions of its flying personnel. The Gallipoli’s moment of glory came, and lightning like, vanished during the surprise Japanese invasion of Singapore in early 1942. Hordes of Japs swarmed toward the R.A.F. aerodrome; out went the call, “Warm up the Gallipolis!” And, indeed, 36 of the breed might have risen to meet the foe had not their special boarding ladders turned up missing.
The sobriquet Sitting Duck has clung to the Gallipoli ever since — an unjust cut in view of this perfectly harmless old war horse’s clearly worthwhile intentions. The last survivor serves today as a chicken house — albeit an impressive one — for the Maharani of Gunjipor. It crash-landed on her lawn in 1944, but the R.A.F. despite numerous reminders, simply keeps forgetting to come round and pick it up.
Images Copyright © 1982 by Bruce McCall
(Very much tongue in cheek!)
WT)