The Prop Was What?

[MIflyer]

I am in the process of building Monogram's classic 1/32 F3F-3, trying to finally do one "right" after more than 50 years when I last tried, and that led to my recalling an article I read in an EAA publication years ago.

An F3F went into the Pacific Ocean and was fished out and sent back to the East coast for overhaul. When the overhaul was complete a ferry pilot made a long tortuous flight to take the airplane back to San Diego.

Arriving at his destination, he said he was happy to be rid of the airplane; it was terrible. It would not climb worth a darn, and cruised slowly despite its powerful R-1820 engine. The people at San Diego told him he was nuts.. The F3F was the hottest airplane around, It climbed like a rocket, better than anything else in the world. It cruised faster than most anything else the USN had, too. He had to be an incompetent pilot.

Then one grizzled old crew chief went out, looked at the airplane and came back, saying. "I don't doubt what he says. It is a tribute to that airplane that it flies at all. They set the prop blades up backwards. The prop is set up to work correctly but the curved trailing edges of the blades are all facing forward."

 

[T Bolt]

I can believe it. My dad told a story about a B-24 that came off the line at the Ford Willow Run plant with the control cables hooked up in reverse. It went screaming down the runway for the first time and refused to lift off.

 

[MIflyer]

That same thing happened to the first Me-262 they reassembled in the US. Fortunately the pilot recognized what was going on and managed to take off, fly a pattern and get it back on the ground.

A friend of mine who flew Dakotas and Wellingtons in WWII said one day he watched a crew climb into a Wellington and proceed to take off, or try to. Back then they trained crews to fly complex airplanes not by means of an attaining generalized knowledge but by telling them to follow Step1, Step 2, etc.

In that incident the pilot was told to wait until the ASI showed a certain speed before pulling back on the wheel. But the cover over the pitot tube had not been removed and so the ASI never showed any airspeed. They ran right off the end of the runway and wrecked.

Once during my flight training I looked over to see the ASI sitting at zero during takeoff when we should have been going at least 50 mph. My first thought was that I had forgotten to turn it on! But my instructor said that a sweatbee had no doubt climbed into the pitot tube. The airplane felt right so I took off and flew an hour with no ASI. That used to be a standard part of learning to fly in years before. But he also told me if that happened while I was solo to not take off.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Back in my days as a vicious flight instructor, I discovered that an 8P finish nail would slide right into a Cessna 150 or 172 pitot tube with just enough friction to stay put and be almost invisible to the casual observer. This came in handy whenever a cocky arrogant student developed a cavalier attitude about preflight inspections. Often they would get all the way to the 40 MPH call before it sunk in that they had a problem.
Later on, after their ego had recovered and their attitude was getting cocky again, it was time for them to experience the effects of a piece of ultra transparent Scotch tape over the static port. Needless to say, these lessons waited until they had achieved a reasonable level of expertise, but before they soloed.
Given the prevalence of mud dauber wasps in the area, they would be likely to experience these things sooner or later anyway, and I thought it best to have it happen for the first time under controlled circumstances.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[MIflyer]

I read where in the 60's the Air Force was holding a race using three B-58's that would fly to Japan and then come back across the Pacific and along the northern border of the US. There were many personal bets placed on which airplane would win. En route to Japan they stopped at a base for refueling and as they were getting ready to mount up and launch the pilot of one B-58 happened to look into the pitot tube on the tip of the nose ans saw something white. They removed the pitot tube and found it was the filter off a cigarette. That would have shut down their takeoff during the roll, and it did not get there by accident!

As it was that B-58 was well in the lead on the way back because of some innovative tanker rendezvous techniques the crew had developed. But they suffered the failure of a piece of equipment that had never failed before and thus had to abort. A few decades later the pilot asked his old commander about those curious incidents and he replied that there had been a lot of money bet on which airplane would win.

 

[MIflyer]

By the way, I have been struggling with the Revell Germany "multilingual" instructions for the F3F and found I had an older edition of the kit with the original instructions. I scanned them and if anyone needs a copy then let me know.