Yeah... not worth the hassle.
Masters of the Air
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USAAF called it Aphrodite, USN called it Anvil.
B-17s and PB4Y-1s (single tail B-24) RPVs
Remembering the Death of Lt. Joe Kennedy Jr. and America’s First Combat DronesSeventy years ago, on August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. perished in one of the first American fatalities associated with a pilotless aircraft,…airandspace.si.eduDidn’t work out too well.
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Those fuckers only released one episode this week.
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Those bastards…
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I’m taking the wife to see the falls from the Canuck side later this year. Should I not go through customs near there? I have a low threshold for bullshit, don’t need an international incident.
I'm going to be in Ontario a fair bit off and on this year Razer, let me know when you're up here. If you have time and the inclination the National air and space museum is about a 3 hour drive from Niagra (everyone and I mean everyone drives 80 if not 85, ask Slamfire), and it's fantastic. Plus one of the curators does QA testing for the same bunch I do some with from DCS/ED, and I'm sure he'd hook us up with a backstage tour - I want to see their Go229 and some other stuff that isn't on display yet.
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Wait - Sluggish was your father on B17s? Man, that's crazy, I bet you have some incredible stories from him. One of my grandfathers flew on Lancasters doing ferry runs from where they were built here in Canada to the UK, he never dropped bombs though.
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No set date yet for the trip. Just finalized our Cape Hatteras-Kitty Hawk-Ocracoke Island-DC- Hershey, Penn trip in July.
I was thinking about September.
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Wait - Sluggish was your father on B17s? Man, that's crazy, I bet you have some incredible stories from him. One of my grandfathers flew on Lancasters doing ferry runs from where they were built here in Canada to the UK, he never dropped bombs though.
Crew Chief. A 22 year old MSG responsible for a very complex machine and ten lives.
42-30342 / T’aint A Bird II | B-17 Bomber Flying Fortress – The Queen Of The Skiesb17flyingfortress.de -
Crew Chief. A 22 year old MSG responsible for a very complex machine and ten lives.
Wow, I didn't know that. Did he operate one of the gun stations too, like the top turret or nose guns? Did he talk to you much about flying in the war?
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The Crew Chief only flew after repairs that required a test flight. He didn't talk much about the war, although when he got older he started to loosen up about it. I was probably the one he talked most about it with. I believe he struggled with the consequences of his particular mission, knowing that he more than likely had a hand in the deaths of many civilians, but he never expressed this to me. Men of his generation were cut from a different cloth. I have a headset which he pulled from a dead ball turret gunner, several B-17 tech manuals (with his handwritten notes) a map of GB with some notes written on it and a copy of Contrails. That's all he kept from the war.
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My dad used to have an entire wall of shit he brought back from the Pacific. I still have the bolo knife a native made out of a broken P-38 prop (he traded a bed sheet for it) He died when I was in high school, wish I talked to him more about his time over there
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There's SOOOOoo much I want to know NOW, at age 63, of the life my father lived then (HIS father was born in 1892, I remember him as a kid). From his records I got from the Gov, he quit college after Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Navy, eventually went to flight training at P-Cola (I remember him telling how much he loved flying the Waco...(got to fly in one on one of the Dayton gatherings)) He flew PBY's and eventually the R4D (C-47) where he spent the war flying for the 7th Fleet, was eventually a/the check-out officer of the R4D for the 7th Fleet. Was in Navy Reserves until 1958, right before I was born. I remember him mostly as a man who was very unhappy, could never glean the why
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THAT's cool as shit
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I'd like to put it in a shadow box but I seriously need to find a way to preserve the rubber. I remember when I was a little kid putting that headset on and the rubber was supple and flexible. Now, it's very hard and fragile. The flat spot facing toward the camera was from the headset laying down on my dresser top for a couple months.
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Tough to preserve rubber once it starts to crumble
You may be able to find replacement pads for display and keep the originals. That stuff is around
Is this the headset you have?
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That has different cups. I believe that's a cockpit headset. These are gunner headset. They needed to make a good seal with the crew cap.
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