Melbourne FL, as every year, B17 "One o nine" and B24 "the dragon and his tail" are visiting us. I chated with a WW2 B17 pilot from the same BG as the planes with the "A" on the tail (don't recall wich one).
He was 21 at the time, he did 35 sorties, all in B17. It must have been around the end of the war as he never encountered any german aircraft. He said:" our escort was probably good".
The danger was the flak, he lost the nb1 thank to it. He could stay in formation for the bomb run, he just needed to floor the 3 other ones. When the bomb run was done, he nursed the engines back to England, forced to leave the formation.
During is TOD, he caught some flak impacts in his plane and some crews got injured from time to time, but nothing serious.
He always had a problem with his number 4 engine, the ground crew could never figure out what it was. Engine working fine up to 10K, then had a serious loss of power. When back for landing below 10K, engine 100% operational again.
He said, they typically flew at 25K. One time only he climbed to 32K, but because the leader wanted to fly over a cumulonimbus. They never could overfly it, and returned to base as the rest of the squads did earlier. He said you could feel that the controls were very mushy at that alt and that the B17 couldn't go higher.
He explained that the B24's were usually flying at 15K. His bomb load out was usually 3000 pound of bombs. On the question :"B24s could bring more?", he laughted and said that:" We hate them, and they hate us
, it was always a competition. They said they could bring more, more but they didn't have to fly at 25K".
He felt very confident in the B17, always felt it would go home in it if damaged. He stated that the B24 was way more weacker, he explained something about the fuel lines and explosions, but I didn't understood
.
Oh, and he received a direct hit from the flak but the shell didn't detonated
.
B17/B24 are at Melbourne FL up to friday, maybe sat morning.
Wanted to share the info, so long all.
