favourite korean war aircraft

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Don't want to be a buzz kill on the F-86 - it's my sig pic - but I had the expereince of seeing an RCAF Sabre fly into Lake Ontario and crash in front of me at the Toronto airshow when I was 10 or 11. One minutes the pilot, an American who had joined the RCAF to fight, before 1941, was carving this barrel roll over us and the next as he pulled out he was just a few feet off in his calculations and the open nose flew right into the water ... and sank like a stone. Can still see it - a September day - the airshow was a discrete event back then from the Exhibition (CNE). Targets were moored offshore and P-51, RCN Sea Furies made diving runs. That was the way it was back then ... but it was a misty afternoon and maybe the show should have been cancelled.
IIRC the pilot's name was Green.
 
 
S/L W.R. Greene
 
My first flight was in a Bell-47. Gettysburg, PA. It was owned by Agro-Rotors. A crop dusting outfit. I was about 12.
 
When I enlisted in the USAF, I had to get a morals-waiver; I'd had a run-in with Johnny Law at age 15, and admitted to using a little weed as well -- but this was 1988 and the 80s build-up needed warm bodies, so my recruiter told me to get five letters of recommendation and he'd waiver me.

One of the letters was from a longtime friend of my family, Warren "Chief" Garvie, so nick-named because he was half Lakota Sioux and half Ojibwa native. Anyway, Chief was a father figure to me in a way, and was happy to provide one of my letters. He was also a retired TSgt who in Korea was a flight-engineer on a B-29 pulling something like 58 missions over DPRK. My recruiter loved his letter for that fact alone, but Sgt Schmitt didn't know the half of it.

Chief's last mission, in 1952(?) saw his plane shot down. They made it over the Yellow Sea on two engines but had to put down into the drink, Chief doing what he could to milk the engines. All but one crew, iirc, survived the ditching and subsequent 14 hours floating awaiting rescue.

So the -29, while outdated by then, is a favorite Korean War airplane of mine too, for personal reasons.

He died in 1994. I still miss me some Wagonburner.
 
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