ThunderChief76
Airman 1st Class
Got this as a set. Signed by Gunther Rall. My Logbook and Robert Taylor sketch.
A new book in my library.
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DBII
Senior Master Sergeant
An awesome, if depressing book.
It's a good read
Same!
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Some great purchases....
MiTasol
2nd Lieutenant
Just got these. They have not been loved and have cockroach damage as well as the usual age problems
Vol 1 is very fragile with many torn pages so will need to be copied one page at a time - painful. Basic page size is just a bit larger than A5 (or 1/2 letter) but some foldouts are at least six times that and look like they will take two scans on my A3 (11x17) scanner bed.
The Vol 3 Part 1 (photos 2, 3, 4) is what can best be described as an abbreviated Illustrated parts catalogue. It is stapled together and then the binding edge has fabric glued over it making it impossible to dissassemble and copy in my doc feed scanner. I will try a camera and dewarping software but have not found anything yet that will produce an even half decent version of the page below - if anyone has any suggestions please let me know by PM. It is foolscap/folio size so way to big for my iphone scanner made this way .
The Firefly manual is also very fragile but will be easy to scan but is a very low priority (not an aircraft I have ever been interested in). It has lots of pasted in revisions and they may be covering important text. Impossible to know unless someone else has a better copy
Vol 1 is very fragile with many torn pages so will need to be copied one page at a time - painful. Basic page size is just a bit larger than A5 (or 1/2 letter) but some foldouts are at least six times that and look like they will take two scans on my A3 (11x17) scanner bed.
The Vol 3 Part 1 (photos 2, 3, 4) is what can best be described as an abbreviated Illustrated parts catalogue. It is stapled together and then the binding edge has fabric glued over it making it impossible to dissassemble and copy in my doc feed scanner. I will try a camera and dewarping software but have not found anything yet that will produce an even half decent version of the page below - if anyone has any suggestions please let me know by PM. It is foolscap/folio size so way to big for my iphone scanner made this way .
The Firefly manual is also very fragile but will be easy to scan but is a very low priority (not an aircraft I have ever been interested in). It has lots of pasted in revisions and they may be covering important text. Impossible to know unless someone else has a better copy
Thought this was a full on, large scale, amphibious landing that I had no idea of...no quite.
I do! I have aome questions though:
1) If I understand correctly, you were unable to fully take advantage of the National Archives because of it's closure due to COVID. If that's true, do you believe the book suffers in anyway because of this?
2) In some of the top down photos of this plane in flight there are what appear to a multitude of small light colored circles all over the airframe. The consensus of the forum is that these are inspection stickers attached across access panel doors. As probably the resident expert on this aircraft, what is your opinion? Also, could you guess at the color? (White?)
Snautzer01
Honourably banned
- 38,174
- Mar 26, 2007
Airframes
Benevolens Magister
This just arrived, from Pen & Sword.
I briefly covered the story of these units in my "Travels of Tel's Tin Tent" thread earlier this year, after visiting the Museum of the British Resistance, at Parham (Framlingham) airfield, so I just had to get this to learn more about this very secret organisation.
I briefly covered the story of these units in my "Travels of Tel's Tin Tent" thread earlier this year, after visiting the Museum of the British Resistance, at Parham (Framlingham) airfield, so I just had to get this to learn more about this very secret organisation.
Answer 1: Since submitting the material for this book to Osprey, we've been able to get what's in NARA and frankly I don't think we would have been able to use much of it anyway due to the publisher's restrictions on how many pages, how many illustrations, and how many words we were allowed to include in order to keep within the "X-Plane Series" format. It's mainly drawings of components, and a few technical reports that would benefit aero engineers more than average readers. We're working on an all-inclusive future work that will pull these in though, along with a huge number of other things that we've found in more obscure places and private collections. That's at least 2 years out, assuming that we can find a publisher willing to tackle such a big job.
Answer 2: My own opinion, based on having spent the first 3 years of my career at USN/USMC aircraft rework depots, is that the marks could be either stickers or white paint or maybe just bare metal, put there as some sort of thing for maintainers. I'm attaching one of the few photos we have that shows some of them close up, and each of these is associated with a small access panel. They weren't on the aircraft when it rolled out of final assembly or during taxi testing, but at least some had appeared by the time the first flight occurred. They're on both upper and lower surfaces too. I'm pretty sure they were white because they stand out more brightly against the upper surface color than the tail numbers which we know were yellow, and are on a par with the star in the national insignia. They're easily visible against the lower gray surfaces too, more so than I would expect yellow to be. At some point they were either removed (if they were tape) or painted over, because they don't appear in rare color frames dating to summer 1944, although the usual worn-off paint on fasteners is evident. But then they must have been put back on because they definitely show up on the post-fire photos of its final flight on 6 September.
About the "tape" - I have a half-baked theory that the yellow line patterns that were on the upper wings for at least part of XP-67's life may have been tape as well. That's based on close examination of one of the only photos we have that shows the details of those areas. That might explain why there's a faint residue from its removal on one wing in particular, in the famous overhead inflight view. I know that there was an XP-67 finish specification but so far it hasn't been found, and I think it's going to take something like that to nail this down definitively.
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