Good Morning

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 08/05/2020 at 09:05 • Filed to: good morning oppo, Planelopnik, wingspan

3

7

Happy Hump Day, Oppo.

A Curtiss C-47 flies above the Himalayas, known to pilots as !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , during WWII. Running from April 1942 to November 1945, flights over the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains brought desperately needed food, fuel, spare parts, medical supplies, and even livestock to the Chinese Army and US Army Air Force units fighting against the Japanese, who had cut the overland Burma Road supply route. In the course of two-and-a-half years of operations, 650,000 tons of supplies passed over The Hump, but the dangerous high-altitude flights claimed nearly 600 aircraft crashed, missing, or written off, while 1,659 pilots and crew were killed or missing.

RacinBob > ttyymmnn 08/05/2020 at 09:11

3

That was tough duty. Hours of flight, anything breaks, or you get lost, or the weather changes and you die. When you get there, you offload and everybody plays the game of guessing how much fuel to leave onboard so that you will have barely enough to fly back with. Then you get to do the whole thing again tomorrow.....

Not my idea of fun.

ttyymmnn > RacinBob 08/05/2020 at 09:23

0

Especially flying a C-46:

But among the ATC pilots the Commando was known, with good reason, as the “flying coffin.” From May 1943 to March 1945, Air Transport Command received reports of thirty-one instances in which C-46s caught fire or exploded in the air. Still others were listed merely as “missing in flight,” and it is a safe assumption that many of these exploded, went down in flames, or crashed as the result of vapor lock , carburetor icing, or other defects

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 08/05/2020 at 09:29

0

And I was about to say how much fun it would be to fly in one!

BaconSandwich is tasty. > ttyymmnn 08/05/2020 at 09:49

1

It makes me wonder how many untouched downed aircraft are still littering the area.

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 08/05/2020 at 09:51

1

It seems they were okay in airline service, where regular maintenance wasn’t a challenge. 

ttyymmnn > BaconSandwich is tasty. 08/05/2020 at 09:55

2

I would bet a lot of them are almost completely inaccessible, or have been swallowed by glaciers. Things got a bit better when they switched from the C-46 to the C-54, but flights were still limited by a lack of pressurization, and it imagine it was cold as balls up there.

“In late 1944, the operation was flying mostly daylight and good weather,” wrote radio operator Wendall A. Phillips . To increase tonnage, the planes were ordered into the air in any weather and 24 hours a day. “Of course, the tonnage rapidly improved but, so did our losses in ‘Aluminum Alley,’ as we called it,” he said. “The Hump became littered with our aircraft. On a clear day, you could see the sun reflecting off the wreckage of crashed planes lying there.” ( Flying the Hump: 75 years later )

415s30 W123TSXWaggoIIIIIIo ( •_•))°) > ttyymmnn 08/05/2020 at 13:49

1

The other way to go...