Mysterious Pacific island runway?

[grampz]

Well syscom3....... Typhoon chasing is fun....lots of seat cusion chewing time.
Ocean flying is pretty much as the saying goes...99% boring and 1% sheer terror.... cept for typhoons and then it's about 50 /50.
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Here's one for ya..... I have a cousin in San Diego who digs airplanes and she thinks I can walk on water. We occassionally discuss some of my mis-adventures. I recently sent the following email to her..... which you might find interesting...
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From: "grampz" <[email protected]>
Subject: WB-47 Damage at Wake Island
Date: Sunday, September 23, 2007 12:29 AM

Okay Missy

I mentioned I landed a Wake Island one night with a very sick airplane.... Below is a depiction of the damage.......
We approached Wake Island from Guam and was cleared into Wake on a Jet Penetration approach.
A jet Penetration is a fuel saving approach that we used to use on some landing approaches. It amounted to dropping all of the landing gear at @ 40,000 feet, retarding the throttles to idle and go into a screaming dive toward the ground..... leveing out at 2,500 above the ground/sea.

I pulled the throttles to idle and called for the landing gear and when the handle was placed down, all hell broke loose....... banging and clanging and thumping and masive vibration........Immediately all of the air pressure instruments went ape **** and we noted a large discrepency between the pilots and coplilots
altimeters and airspeed indicators.

We continued to descend ...... no place else to go...... and then had to decide how to determine what altitude to level out at......... at night over water with no visual clues it is almost impossible to judge distance above the water..... if you can even see the water.........

A little info here...... aircraft altitude is read by air pressure instruments which get their reading from static ports on the side of the nose...... airspeed is read by pitot tubes mounted on the side of the nose that read ram air pressure....... In this air craft the pilots static and pitot tubes were mounted on the left side of the fuselage..... the co-pilots were mounted on the right side....... redundancy

Back to our adventure...... I told the Wake tower we had a problem but we dint know what caused it..... I told them I was going to turn on my landing lights and descend until I could see the light reflected off of the water..... I asked them to watch our approach and advise if we started to look too low in the sky.... my eventual level off point was close to 2500 feet according to the co-pilots altimeter.... my altimeter was all over the place...... so we decided to fly on the co-pilots altimeter......At this time, Wake had no sort of instrument landing system....... no ILS or radar approach....... strictly an airborne approach, eye balls, elbows, and ass holes!

This airplane was know as a widow maker in that it was extremely critical on landing..... it had to be flown at touch down weight plus 5 knots and then stalled on the aft main bicyle gear....... and at this point since we dint know what our problem was, we were goin to be forced to fly at touchdown plus 5 knots with an unreliable airspeed indicator. I decided to fudge and added another 5 knots. The strategy being as soon as we were over the threshold of the runway I would flare and call for the brake chute while still in the air......... Thats what we did and I screwed up and made a grease job landing.... the chute blossoming and the aft main gear touch down occured exactly together and the landing was smooth as glass.........

We taxied in and parked and then got out of the airplane...... and I almost fell on the ground!!!!! The whole left side of the airplane was gone!!!!

The forward landing gear door was mounted on two hinges..... a front hinge and a back hinge.... when the gear handle was placed down, the gear door started to open and the forward hinge failed. The door rotated around the aft hinge and tore loose the former that the door was attached to... which tore loose a bunch of longerons and stringers which unzipped all of the aircraft skin all the way back to the aft main landing gear door..... In the process.. the stringers and formers tore loose all kinds of good stuff like black boxes and electrical wiring and hydraulic lines....etc.

The red hatched area on the picture below approximates the damaged area. The weenies at headquarters wanted me to stick with the airplane until it was fixed and I dint reply..... I gave the airplane to the maintenence troops at Wake and told them to store it...... And there was a C-124 coming in soon on the way to Hawaii.... we bumed a ride and when we got to Hickam AFB..... And I announced our arrival.

They subsequently had to equip a C130 with a complete sheet metal shop...... go to the bone yard in Tucson for pieces and parts and then proceed to rebuild this airplane..........

And like I said.......... they sent me back to Wake to fly it home........

 

[ccheese]

Man..... talk about a pucker factor thrown in ! WOW !

Charles

 

[syscom3]

Wow!!!!

I didnt know they used B47's for typhoon hunting.

I thought they were using B50's at the time.

 

[grampz]

B-47s as WB-47s entered tropical storm recon in 1963 as the B-50 was phased out. They were assigned to 9th WRW at McClellan AFB, CA.....Guam, Ramey, Philipines, Japan, Alaska, Hunter AFB etc. The WB-47 was phased out in 1969 when the WC-130 took over the job.... The B-47 was out of production so it was very hard and expensive to maintain in overseas venues.....The WC-130 continues today (and they are still building them) in the Air Force Reserve, but no longer covers the Pacific Ocean. We now have vastly improved satellites.

I had the dubious honor of flying the first mission against our first weather Satellite Tyros..... We had proved our accuracy in storm reporting and Air Weather Central wanted to acess the new weather satellite in the mid Pacific area. So when the first storm came along after Tyros was launched, we reconn'd the storm and AWC compared the Tyros info against our reports. It turned out that Tyros was pretty close to being on target.....so in essence we kinda worked ourselves outa job....... The big thing about storm recon in the Pacific revolved around the fact that Uncle Sam had the 7th fleet ginin around out there and the thought it would be a good idea if they knew about the weather brewing off of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone.... which is a fancy name for north and south hemispheric weather convergence on the equator........... more fun than a barrel of monkeys....and bunches of gray hair

An interesting aside here.... all of the time we were ginin around in the atmosphere from the north pole to the southern Pacific Ocean we were also engaged in gaseous and particulate air sampling..... sniffing for the building blocks of above ground atomic and hydrogen weapons that some folks might be detonating above or on Planet Earth.... I might add that I have spent more than my share driving around in radioactive clouds from time to time. I almost glow in the dark......... ciao baby

 

[louborok]

It isn't wake. I landed at Wake as a B-29 crew member in '64 and again in '65. Then, I worked there for Pan Am Dec. '64 tp Dec.65.

 

[tm3858]

This look like Johnson island, around 1 hour from Honolulu by plane

 

[Matt308]

A jet Penetration is a fuel saving approach that we used to use on some landing approaches. It amounted to dropping all of the landing gear at @ 40,000 feet, retarding the throttles to idle and go into a screaming dive toward the ground..... leveing out at 2,500 above the ground/sea.

.

Assuming a "Jet Penetration" is a non-emergency maneuver, you can drop gear at FL400 and "go into a screaming dive"? Isn't that contrary to any B-47 flight manual??? Please inform me of how that works.

 

[N4521U]

Hi Grampz,

Here it is:

pkmj - Google Maps

Unfortunately, only the far end of the runway is in good resolution!

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

How funny, runways 7 and 25, same directions as the runway at Livermore CA where I learned to fly.... a world apart.

 

[pbfoot]

Assuming a "Jet Penetration" is a non-emergency maneuver, you can drop gear at FL400 and "go into a screaming dive"? Isn't that contrary to any B-47 flight manual??? Please inform me of how that works.

It an approach from high altitude usually using the TACAN . I'm trying to recall but most started at FL200 and the first part was called the penatration turn. But as for dropping the gear thats not part of it . It is a standard military precision approach fro higher altitudes

 

[GrauGeist]

This look like Johnson island, around 1 hour from Honolulu by plane

They figured out where it is, see post #12 (dated September 2007)...the runway is Amata Kabua International Airport located on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands....

 

[Aaron Brooks Wolters]

I was not looking there because he said it was not in the Marshals but that is sure it. Thank you Dave.

 

[grampz]

Assuming a "Jet Penetration" is a non-emergency maneuver, you can drop gear at FL400 and "go into a screaming dive"? Isn't that contrary to any B-47 flight manual??? Please inform me of how that works.

I don't know where you got the idea that a jet penetration is contrary to the B-47 Tech Order.... Jet penetrations were introduced at a time where we were the only ones flying large jets at high altitudes and everybody else in the world was driving fan type propllers down around 10 to 15 thousand feet.... in order to keep gas guzzeling jet engines from getting stuck in low altitude traffic patterns with the fan guys.

For your info Boeing (being the smart dudes that they are) made allowances for the concept of "Jet Penetrations" they incorporated the idea of screaming dive penetrations by allowing for a "Drag Gear" system.
Which amounted to a guarded switch labled "Drag Gear" that when activated dropped the aft main bicycled truck and the two outriggers thus creating more drag and allowing for a steeper descent. When approach altitude was achieved, lowering the landing gear lever extended the forward main gear truck and landing configuration was completed.

 

[grampz]

It an approach from high altitude usually using the TACAN . I'm trying to recall but most started at FL200 and the first part was called the penatration turn. But as for dropping the gear thats not part of it . It is a standard military precision approach fro higher altitudes

I don't know why you guys are having a problem with a "Jet Penetration". For starters..... back in the 60s, very few airports had a Tacan... a good many airports were still using the low frequency A/N type fly the beam instrument approach system. (You're giving away your age!), Wake Island at this time had no instrument approach.... strictly eye balls!

We are talking about an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that saw maybe 2 or 3 airplanes a day,,,(on a busy day!).... nobody flew anykind of published approach .......every approach was straight in from "present postion" visually to the runway....There was no traffic pattern mainly because there was no traffic.....

A 20,000 foot approach with a penetration turn came stateside later and was used to seperate jets from props and allow for a traffic pattern situation at busy civilian and military airports