Picture of the Day - Miscellaneous

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Something a bit unusual in this shot of 357th FG CO Col Chickering's P-39 being cranked up at Hamilton Field in July 1943. What is unusual is that the ground crew is using a crank inserted into the inertia starter of the V-1710 to start the airplane. I don;t think I have ever seen a picture of that before. The famous 357th trained in P-39's before being sent to the ETO to fly P-51B's. NASM photo.

 
Exhaust blast looks nasty for the mechs.
 
special ed said:
Exhaust blast looks nasty for the mechs.
Click to expand...

A friend of mine who was a crewmember on USN PB4Y-2 said that in order to start the engines on the ground someone had to go out on the wing and push a button on each engine. The first time he did that the exhaust blast was so extensive that he stuck a fire extinguisher in it, thinking it had caught fire.

I knew that the PT-13/17 was usually was started by cranking the inertia starter, and I think the special lightweight version of the P-40 had one also, but I did not know the P-39 was so equipped. Of course there are well known movies of BF-109E being started by ground crew cranking the starter.

A friend of mine had one of those starters on his Waco biplane R-670 engine. The starter could be spun up by either a hand crank or the electric motor. First you spun it up and then you hit the "Engage" button. The location where you'd have had to stand on his airplane was such that using a crank was just about impossible.
 
Back when I built that first release of the Monogram 1/48 P-47D, I wondered if they ever mounted that special "flat" drop tank clearly designed to fit under the Jug's belly out on the wing pylons. Well, here is a nice shot of a 56 FG P-47D with a flat drop tank on one wing pylon and a different type of drop tank on the other pylon.
 
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