<VV> Airplanes at the Workshop

[Tony Underwood]

At 04:08 AM 2/27/2007, Rick Norris wrote:



> > Another great week end at the fourth annual Performance Workshop with all
> > the usual suspects, Corvairs, hi-po parts, airplanes, general B.S.ing
>,good
> > food and an ice storm!
> > As the good old boys say, It don't git no better'nis!
> >
> > Friday after unloading the car at Gary's place several of us went to the
> > USAF Museum for a special behind the scenes tour of the restoration shops.
> > What a treat! We were all in "airplane resurrection heaven" as it were. My
> > wife would have called it junk.
> > The highlight of the tour was seeing the Memphis Belle, the famous B-17 in
> > the initial stages of her eight to ten year restoration. To see and touch
> > that piece of history was thrilling.



I remain sorta confused about the "8 to 10 year" restoration.

The airplane was only recently restored and placed on display in 
Tennessee on Mud Island at the Memphis Belle Memorial 
facility.    This is what got me wondering about how the airplane was 
now being commented upon as requiring a long term "restoration".

Much of the recent restoration of B-17F #124485 "Memphis Belle" 
(named after Memphis resident Margaret Polk) was done by volunteer 
workers at the Memphis Aerotech center who did some rather detailed 
work on the airplane which was in somewhat worn condition when work 
actually began in earnest in the 1980s.   I had a first-hand look 
into what went on and I even had a slight hand in some of it, mostly 
in marketing, spreading the word via photographs and an article in 
Flypast magazine "begging for funding".    The old bomber eventually 
turned out rather nicely done and simply was NOT that deteriorated 
when the Air Force decided to move the airplane to the USAF museum.


By the way, there's a VERY interesting story about how that 
particular move came to be...

During the initial restoration of the airplane at the Aerotech 
center, it was discovered that the airplane did NOT actually belong 
to the city of Memphis, where it had been since the late 
1940s.    The bomber had been pulled off a flight line in New England 
(Jersey, I think) while awaiting its final destination with the 
scrappers when someone who knew about the airplane spotted it and 
pulled some strings, contacted the Memphis city council and suggested 
that this airplane was a piece of wartime history and should be 
preserved and that it could be had by simply buying it for a little 
more than 300 bucks, which is what the aluminum recyclers were paying 
per airplane.

That was all...  about 310 to 320 bucks for a B-17 in airworthy 
condition straight from the military property lists.

There were people who were buying bombers this way and simply 
draining the aviation fuel from the tanks (the aircraft were topped 
off, had full tanks in expectations of flying to where ever the 
purchasers wanted them to go) and then leaving the airplane behind 
for whatever fate awaited it...  since the aviation fuel alone was 
worth more than the pittance price the disposal offices wanted for 
the airplanes.    Pathetic...


Anyway...    Memphis city management said OK and the deal was struck, 
the airplane was flown to Memphis and placed on display by the 
airport where it remained for many years before it was finally taken 
off its plinth in the '70s after suffering the ravages of weather, 
bees, birds, sunburn, and whatever else it endured while being left 
sitting outside fort that long.

After some time at the Aerotech center, it became obvious that moving 
the airplane to and from the work site was a problem what with having 
to find a tug each time to move that much airplane around, too large 
to leave parked at the center when it wasn't actually being worked on 
etc.    The fellow leading the restoration work decided that it would 
be much better to simply refurbish a couple of the engines and run 
them up, and taxi the airplane to and from...  this ended up 
prompting a visit by several Air Force officers who proceeded to read 
the Aerotech center folks the Riot Act in that no fuel was to be put 
into the airplane and no batteries installed and certainly the 
engines would not be started.    This brought forth some "Who the 
Hell are you?" remarks from the Aerotech folks, whereupon the Air 
Force officers informed the tech center that the Air Force still 
owned the airplane because although the city had agreed to buy it 
after the war, *nobody had ever actually paid for it*.

Ironically, it seemed that the B-17F #124485 was still being carried 
on USAF property books, in fact the last remaining B-17 whose final 
"financial" disposition had never been resolved.

The Air Force guys felt that fueling the airplane would be dangerous 
and they didn't wanna risk a fire which could damage or destroy a 
valuable historical aircraft.

Interestingly, the USAF was quick to mandate policy on what would be 
done with the airplane but not as brisk in providing ANY monetary 
assistance on the airplane's restoration which was done with ALL 
private donations of work and funding, and with NO help from the 
government/USAF.    It was slow going for a while, since all this 
work was expensive and even after the airplane was done it required 
another 100,000 bucks to build an enclosure for the airplane at the 
memorial site and that took even more time.    By the way, the nose 
art on the airplane was reapplied by the son of Tony Starcer, the 
former Disney animator who went to war and ended up painting nose art 
on dozens of B-17s while serving with the 8th Airforce during the 
war, and who had originally done the nose art of Betty Grable on the 
Memphis Belle by request of the pilot, Bob Morgan who was from 
Asheville NC and not Memphis, although the girlfriend Margaret Polk was.

Bob Morgan passed away not long ago.


The saga of The Memphis Belle is well known by warbird enthusiasts, 
more details are available in libraries and the web.    Its recovery 
and restoration and arguments between the Aerotech folks and the Air 
Force are another matter.    There's not as much info about the 
daunting task the restoration efforts faced for several years while 
attempting to refurbish the airplane.    A lot of dedicated people 
spent long hours and their own personal money on getting the airplane 
back to the way it should have been.


Although not a lot is known about the details, I suspect that 
finances for maintenance and upkeep were partly responsible for the 
Belle being moved from Tennessee to the USAF Museum...  that, and the 
fact that someone in the museum finally got around to deciding that 
it is an important aircraft which should be preserved and displayed 
along with other famous airplanes in the museum.

Actually, the Aerotech center director who had been responsible for 
the airplane told me in confidence that in his opinion he indeed 
wished that the USAF would have taken the airplane and restored it 
Back When, instead of simply rolling in the door and telling them 
what they couldn't do, while offering NO help in the work.   It was 
his opinion that the Air Force could have done better by the 
airplane, and that it certainly deserved a first class 
restoration...  which it DID eventually get at the Aerotech center.

In all fairness:   The letter received by the director from the USAF 
did state that if the Aerotech center could not finish the 
restoration or if the city of Memphis could not financially support 
the aircraft after the fact, the USAF would reclaim the bomber and 
take it to the USAF Museum to display it there.   After a couple of 
decades, it looks like that's what finally happened.    ;)


Following the restoration, the airplane was finally rolled out of the 
Aerotech center looking fresh and bright and all set to go to war, 
including a full compliment of M-2 .50 cal machine guns, which were a 
bit of a problem to locate...  strange story there, someone actually 
donated the weaponry from a stash of something like 20 M-2 machine 
guns he had stored in his basement.      The donor wished to remain 
anonymous...   other hardware that was needed to complete the resto 
came from all over the world, mostly through donations, a turret 
component here, a gun mount there, and so on.    Much of the wartime 
armament and support equipment had been removed from the airplane 
before it went to Jersey for sale, since the armament etc was still 
useful in other military applications, AND, nobody wanted any 50 cal 
machine guns floating around the private sector..  All of this 
equipment had to be located and reinstalled on the airplane...  not 
an easy task.

Much of the replacement hardware like nose and turret plexiglass 
blisters and windscreens etc were scratch-built and vacuum-formed at 
the Aerotech center, along with reskinning rough spots on the 
airframe (bombay doors, one of which I accidentally dented, and some 
wing panels) and re-covering all the control surfaces with modern 
materials that won't degrade like the organic fabric materials 
originally used.


I also got a look via photos of the airplane's disassembly while 
being readied for transport to Ohio, from the Mud Island facility... 
other than the paint being faded and a general overall dusty 
condition, the airplane still looked good.     Why it's slated for a 
years-long "restoration" is puzzling because it simply wasn't in bad 
condition when the Air Force moved it.


In any event, here's hoping the old warrior gets top notch treatment 
at the USAF Museum, which is likely where it belongs in the first 
place.    It's a scarce airplane, in fact the last remaining combat 
model F-series B-17 in existence...  two other F models are still 
around but they were F-9 models (photo-recon variants) which didn't 
see actual combat.    The Belle is the last one left that saw combat, 
frankly because so damned few of them survived a combat tour.   By 
the time the Belle managed to survive 25 missions (early in the war 
when enemy fighter and flak opposition was still horrific) the G 
models were already in service and the F's were long out of production.

G models are easily ID'ed by their chin turrets, F models had no chin 
turret except for a few of the last F models built under contract by 
Douglas in CA...  Boeing built most of the B-17s but not all, Douglas 
and Lockheed also built thousands under contract because Boeing 
wasn't able to keep up with demand; a dismaying number of B-17s were 
being lost early in the war due to intense opposition over German and 
occupied territories.    In the first year of the air war over 
Germany, a B-17 had a life expectancy of around 12-15 missions...if 
it was lucky.    Many didn't last that long.    The Belle was the 
first to make 25 missions and rotate home...  another B-17, a 303rd 
Bomb Group airplane, also an F, called Hell's Angels also flew 25 
missions at about the same time but didn't "qualify" because it was 
flown by ~three different crews during those first 25, being a bit of 
a squadron hack which was flown by rotating crews.    It caught a lot 
of crap in its day, but it kept on going and went on to survive the 
war with a flock of missions under its belt and at war's end actually 
returned home...

...to be scrapped.     THAT was a shameful loss of a remarkable 
airplane.   Another remarkable 303rd BG airplane which arguably 
(nobody was ever really sure) was also among the first to actually 
fly 25 missions (also with different crews) was another F model 
called Knockout-Dropper, which went on to be the first B-17 to fly 50 
missions and later the first to fly 75 missions.   THAT is an 
impressive tally for a B-17 F model that started out when things were 
tough.    K-D wasn't the only one to rack up high mission 
numbers.   A lot of B-17s eventually accumulated as many as 100 
combat missions later in the war, but airplanes like the Belle and 
Knockout-Dropper and Hell's Angels did it early on, when things were 
rough over Germany and the Luftwaffe was out in full force with a 
vengeance.    A full 1/3 of the B-17s that went to war would take off 
on a combat mission one morning and never come back.

That's  -=[ 4000 ]=-  B-17s that were lost during the war.    As many 
as a thousand more came back so battered and shot up that they were 
declared unairworthy (in spite of having just flown all the way back 
to England) and were parted out.    By the way, IIRC, the 91st BG 
suffered the highest losses of any 8th Air Force bomb group.

Interestingly enough, the Belle was shot up numerous times, took flak 
hits (still has a couple of holes in her interior bulkheads) and 
returned home more than once with engines out, but on the 25 mission 
the airplane got not as much as a single scratch, as if it was being 
rewarded for having caught so much Hell in the first 24, thus the 
cakewalk 25th mission.    Other 324th Sqdn/91st BG B-17s didn't fare 
as well.   Several were lost that day, others came back with serious 
damage and carrying the bodies of crew KIA.     There are photos of 
B-17s that returned home with combat damage that defied logic in that 
the airplanes still not only flew but brought their crews back 
home.     It's no wonder that after the war, at Kingman Airforce Base 
where hundreds of B-17s were lined up to be scrapped (and eventually 
turned into Corvair engines) there were rows of men with stark and 
stricken faces outside the fence wearing A2 flight jackets crying 
like babies as they watched the scrappers do their jobs.


Sorry for the OT ramblings...   although we *are* talking about 
vehicles with aluminum air cooled engines here...  ;)    ...even if 
the engines in particular were built by Studebaker.  ;)     Yes, the 
Belle has engines manufactured by Studebaker, under contract license 
from Wright.



tony..

Long may the Belle live on