Thank you Nefari for inviting me to join your group for this event. The airlift is an interesting twist on the events. What I found was that dropping bombs in an event is cool, and a great objective, but getting there and back is a white knuckle experience no matter what the goal is.
After stitching my ribs back together from laughing at the radio banter, we came upon our target field and it was time to do what is supposed to be a relatively routine procedure. Land, rearm, launch. In frame 1, I proved that landing was the hard part after breaking a wing off trying to decelerate too quickly. This frame, I managed to get the gear down, line up for the final approach and as I'm looking at the clustered planes all rearming, was shaken back to attention by tracers blasting by me and pinging up my wings.
Bad guy coming in, he could have had a field day hitting the cluster of bombers on the rearm pad, but he came at me and I believe Bortas near me. Unfortunately, he was taken out as I landed, having had his wing blown off causing his explosion.
Rearming went off without a hitch, and just as I taxied back to the runway, calls were coming in about a mass of bad guys inbound. We were all scattering hard trying to get out of there, while our cap was tearing past us heading to the enemy.
Bugging out low and as fast as I could go, check 6 calls drew my attention to an incoming bad guy.
I end up shot to pieces, fuel leaking fast, left elevator destroyed, tail wheel gone, various other non essential parts littering the ground, but the IL2 paid for it, he was tore up between my BBs and the brilliant work of the escorts.
This is a yellow rubber duck. There was a very long ride home, and you can only take so many pictures of squirrels in trees.
As we were all fleeing for our lives, I was joined by Bino who took up a gunner position. As I approached the landing field, I realized that for safeties sake, I should tell Bino to get out of the lower guns, as I had low fuel, spongy controls and no tail, I thought it might be a good idea to be up top where it was safe as there was a good chance that we were going to have a less than stellar landing.
Had I known at the time, I would have simply had him jump out and walk home. Oddly enough, when you land hard, with less than what could be called "control" and that tail hits with no wheel...
It tends to make a loud noise. Remember when I said Bino should jump to an upper gun?
That might have been a poor decision on my part. Over we went.
Long flight, hard fight in and out of the target field, all to come to a squishy end. Ahh well, so goes the war
