The Hurricane deserves so much credit for keeping England safe, but the sleek, glamorous Spitfire always hogs the attention. Beauty and a cool nickname count for a lot. The outdated B17 got the cool name and all the attention while the homely B24 did the hard work. Maybe if it had a cool name it would have been more popular. Hard to get excited by “Liberator”. Nice sentiment, but dull, named by committee, probably.
Good names like Mosquito and Spitfire are hard to predict. The P38 was an important plane, but “Lightning” sounds like a horse. So most of us just stick with P38. That it’s a distinctive, handsome design also makes it easy to love. Not that beauty is enough or the pretty P39 wouldn’t have been hated so much. Probably a lot more than it actually deserved. It lost the popularity contest to the P40, but I’ve always liked the P39 better.
I only know this stuff because my dad was seriously into it and active in the Commemorative (ex-Confederate) Air Force in his retirement. It’s a terrific organization that does a lot to preserve old aircraft and fly them when it’s possible. His wing (Southern California) had a nice B26 they flew regularly. Even a fairly large WWII plane like that was surprisingly cramped inside. No, I never got a ride, but I got the tour from my dad. The B26 is another important plane that has been overshadowed by other bombers of its era. It wasn’t the biggest or most popular, but it was a very tough, reliable plane that usually did its job and made it home safely. Just what you want in a bomber.
@Tridaq: I don’t know if Servel went out of business completely in 1957 or if just part of them did. Or if the name was bought by someone else. But one of the apartment buildings I lived in, that was built in 1972, had 3 natural gas-fired ammonia-based chiller units for air conditioning. (2 of them actually worked) Being a little bit savvy, I knew that such things had existed, but I’d never seen one before and never expected to prior to moving there. The two working ones appeared to be a bit newer than the retired one that had cobwebs and rust and clearly was not functional.
The two functioning units of 3 present worked very well for cooling the building (13 apartment units) until the building changed hands a few years later and the chillers were not properly winterized and froze, destroying them. (the building used plain water for heat and cooling–it was switched over twice a year) The replacement York electric chillers were problematic and just didn’t cool as well, despite there being 3 of them.
It was kind of neat telling people that I had gas-fired air conditioning and watching them go “huh?!”
The Servel name is still being used on refrigerators made by Dometic that use the system you describe. Dometic makes many propane units for RVs, but also larger units sold under the Servel brand for buildings that lack electricity.
BTW, the B26 I was referring to earlier is the A26 that was renumbered as a B26 after the war. I had forgotten the earlier B26 until poking around on the Web and seeing its picture. It’s a much bigger plane, also very useful, but tricky to fly, so it earned a bad reputation before being modified to be more forgiving and harder to stall on landing. The original design had a small wing surface and needed to be landed at higher speeds than pilots were used to. If they slowed to the speeds they were used to the planes would stall. At best that made for a hard landing, sometimes with landing gear damage. The changes to later models and greater crew familiarity reduced the accidents and let the B26 become a success, if not a superstar like the B25.
The A26 was a light bomber/attack airplane designed for various duties, so it wasn’t initially put in the bomber numbering sequence. Just after the end of the war the original B26 model was retired (as the B25 was able to do all it could do and more.) The A26 was then renumbered to B26. It had proven itself a very effective light bomber by the end of the war, able to carry considerably more than it was designed for. They stayed in service well into the Vietnam War, so a fair number still exist. The earlier B26s were almost all scrapped.
My dad’s old CAF wing (he has been gone for seven years) has another somewhat overlooked plane, a C46 transport, not at all well known compared to the C47 (based on the DC3.) The C46 is a big plane for that time, carrying twice as much as the C47, but even it feels oddly small.
I believe the US Forest Service had a B-26 for a number of years around here dont know if they still have it or not,one outfit has a DC 4 modified to do air drops on forest fires(love to watch that ol plane disappear behind a ridge and throttle up on the pullup(tip- dont stand up during a water drop).While we are dishing out accolades for aircraft,the A-6 Intruder was one incredible bird,with guns that thing would have made an incredible COIN aircraft,most people dont recognize the niche for an attack aircraft and by the way they must have finally fixed the flaws in in the V-22(see more of them all the time-but I think thier days are already numbered) I 've talked to B-24 people(one a gunner who miracously survived{His posistion was rated as a few minutes survivibilty in combat} a Neighbor in the area who was a radio operator{Who had to bailout in the English Channel-He may have had the record for surviving over an hour in those rough cold seas} My hat for the “Greatest Generation”-Kevin
B52s may look intimidating on the ground but they are just big targets in the air. They required radar and SAM surpression to work effectively. Their best use now that everyone it seems have a shoulder fired SAM. is the “stand off” and precision guided missiles. War is a game of economics. If an inexpensive piece of equipment can take down a billion dollar piece of machinery, the expensive one becomes obsolete real fast. The most intimidating war machinery are the reliable but cost effective ones. That was the down fall of the Soviet Union…economics. The reusable B52 had a part in that. That’s the military economics of it and why old equipment that works keeps hanging on whether it be military or not.
BUFFs were basically designed to fight wars that no longer exist. That they’ve adapted so well to changing warfare is testament to their versatility as a delivery platform.
While saturation bombing, and using large aircraft as a delivery platform for modern weapons, is an obsolete approach to technologically sophisticated countries such as the U.S., Russia and China, I believe its threat is still a powerful deterrent to less sophisticated countries, which are still pretty common in the world. North Korea tries to present and image of technical sophistication, but I don’t believe they really are. And I doubt if their entire inventory of weaponry would last a week in a war with any major power. I believe that on cases like North Korea, the presence of BUFFs in the region is still a powerful deterrent. I hope I’m right. I pray that North Korea is intimidated.
It’s a role that both the United States and the Soviets, when they existed and China played by proxie. The only threat that less sophisticated countries have is by siding with the other side and getting weaponry that neutralizes the effects if the other. That’s what happened in Afganastan during the Sovet invasion and how they are repelled. Cheap SAMs vs billion dollar copters made fast work of a seemingly invinceable weapon.
Russia wants to be a player again especially where the natural gas pipelines are concerned. That is going on in Ukraine. It is still as much about energy sources as was Irag as is most wars…including the world wars. Probably the single most economically effective weapon that has contributed to more chaos then any other, is the AK47. World pressure would never put up with carpet bombing again. Even the B52 in retrospect was financially ineffective at the task. We can tout ourselves as great warriors pump out our chests and spout words like " Rolling thunder" and “shock and awe” but ft’s all a game we play with semantics. The great equalizer is not a B52 anymore; it’s a smart device hooked up to the Internet. That is the single most influential device that scares powers interested in control; that is more powerful then any device of the past.
The vast majority of people in this world have always wanted to live in peace. Holding specific people accountable for their terrorist and cowardly acts has long been a goal of every peace loving nation. World wars could have been prevented just on that premise alone. The drone is a step in that direction. It took dwn a salvage dictatorship at a cost of one billion with the loss of no American lives as opposed to one trillion with the loss of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of innocents. Israel has long used personal accountability for acts against them for many years. It’s the dawn of a new era and though we hang on to the noble machines of the past, they are limited. Unfortunately, these newer " machines" are as frightening as they are life saving. But, they do signal the demise of a lot of technologies “we would like to see again.”
Even cars we would like to bring back are only allowed on the road with special licensing and permits. That makes it abundantly clear that many older machines just have to be “let go”. Then, there is the can opener and the amazing apple processing device that peals and cores we got 25 years ago from LL Bean…
I d like to see a pick up truck, with an eight foot bed, that was not a behemoth. todays models are just too big in my opinion. even my '75 ford supercab seems small in comparison.
I also miss the side vents in modern vehicles. why did they go away?
I ve also thought that Detroit would have success selling modern “classic” cars. cars with the same form (and same engines, in some cases) as some of the beloved older cars, but with modern safety features, brakes, airbags, etc.
I wouldn’t trust a bumper jack on modern cars. They’d just rip the bumper right off, from the looks of it.
I can almost see us going back to push button transmissions within a generation or two. No one really buys new stick shift cars, and even the super/hyper cars have automated manuals these days. First it’ll be on a 7 series BMW and/or S-class Mercedes, then it’ll trickle down to low end vehicles; like satnav or LED lights
I never trusted a bumper jack on any car I had years ago. Always carried a bottle jack and a 2 by 6 and a jack stand. . It wasn’t the jack, it was the bumpers…terrible and the entire weight of a car suspended by a couple of rusty bolts ( they were after 3 years) was not my idea of safety.
I can recall helping a guy with whom I worked, with his '61 Chevy.
He insisted on jacking up the car at the most forward point of the rear bumper’s “wrap-around”…and that car had bumpers that wrapped around the rear fenders to a major extent.
No matter now much I insisted on using the small indentations on the underside of the rear bumper, he insisted–for reasons that I couldn’t fathom–that jacking should be done on what was the weakest, least-supported part of the rear bumper.
Yup!
You guessed it.
The bumper twisted like a limp pretzel.
I always thought push button gear selectors were a great idea. The old mechanical ones of the '60s were prone to mechanical linkage problems, but with today’s technology it would seem to make sense. It gets the shifter out of the way for better utilization of space.