A Silly Question

July 11, 2018

The white yokes on this model are an oddity; most were black. The model's designed in depth in its flight behaviour. You can burn the engines out if you don't reduce throttle and rpm. It has pressurisation gauges and stuff which you can control manually or the model takes care of them automatically. You need to open cowl flaps for the engines to cool down, to engage the supercharger (known as blower too) at 11 -13 thousand feet on your own and similar things.

The model is an early 749, no weather radar in the nose, it has 9 cockpit windows and two windows on the cockpit roof. They changed this arrangement soon, around 1948-49 I think.

Back then as now once a technology is out people will attempt to copy it, even if they just copy the idea and make it work in their own way.

There's a story about an accidental depressurisation of a passenger connie. A lady was sitting on the toilet and her lower body functioned as a bottle cap. As you can imagine until the plane got below 10,000 feet she was afraid she would be ripped away from the plane on the toilet seat to suffer an ignominious end. It went well.

I don't plan on collecting Mabie Todds or Swans, but it definitely seems that bidders on ebay appreciated a vintage serviced one.

July 11, 2018

Boy, you know your Connies!!! ... A bit better than I do.

I'd just transferred into to McClellan AF base from Cape Cod's Otis AFB. They rushed me through clearing in.....if I'd go directly back to Iceland....I could have my choice of Japan, Taiwan or Thailand TDY's when I came back. I'd known Iceland was bad....having been there twice on TDY, I just didn't know what a hell hole it was until after I'd had the other TDY's.

So as we come out to the plane, with my brand new issued arctic gear and expensive $350 then money tool box. I asked about the plane, 305. Best in the Fleet...

Right...then SAC put it's nose into it.

Scheduled to land at Griffiths AFB NY, a plane was down...so we diverted to Loring AFB in Maine.

The nose wheel wouldn't go down. The navigator crawled down and hand cranked it down. Ambulances and firetrucks raced along the runway as we landed.

Big empty hanger.....that we were not allowed to put our plane in....because we were not a B-52. So the plane sat out and engines froze solid at -30F.

The crew chief put in a 'micro' switch....some 2x4x8....small switch. Used gas heaters to thaw out the 4 motors. In SAC wouldn't lend us the equipment to do an on ground retraction we were flying on a Red X, until we landed proving the nose wheel worked.

So we were met at Goose Bay, by racing fire trucks and ambulances. It wasn't nearly as exciting as the hand cranked landing. They had done an in-air....and the crew chief was sure the switch from our war box worked. But Regs are Regs....Red X= ambulances and fire trucks in a race with the plane.

It was -35....and would be that way for a long time.

After a quick meal at the airport cafeteria, we took again to the air.

An hour out.....over the 28 degree Labrador Sea; a motor quit. Back we went to the racing fire trucks and ambulances. It took three days to swap motors.

Mine had a PRT turbine, that blew up on me, at 13,000 feet over the the 28degree F, Labrador Sea.

And the most beautiful sight in the world is the yellow rotten shore ice, that looks like some giant peed on it. That meant if we bellied in in the woods, I had a chance of surviving, which was not the case if we ditched in the water.

The EC-121 was divided up into passenger seats for TDY's and the radar section. A sudden hush filled the compartment. I looked up....and everyone was looking out the far windows. I craned my neck and looked too. The prop was still and mangled. There was a hole in the engine cowling.

We all stared at the bathroom door.

I was last on...so my duffel bag was on the top of the pile. I decided to go get my arctic pants out of it.

As I walked towards the back, the radio man was hunched over with his hand hiding the mike, mumbling into it. A young tall radar operator was standing, with panic fear in his voice telling some shinny bared Second Lt. He was grounding himself, never going to fly again!

Right about then I started getting nervous. Before I'd just had a few careful thoughts. What did he know that I didn't?

After putting on my arctic pants; and adjusting my parachute harness to thicker pants....we all had on such harnesses. Under the seat was a parachute, a one man life raft and a poopie suit. ....With the arctic coat on. I came back...sat down.....looked hard at the bathroom door and the twenty men who would fight for possession of it.

Of the 4-5 times a EC-121 ditched, the bathroom door came through just fine.

Thule was a good thirty minutes away if they launched immediately. At 28F, one would freeze to death even if you got into the raft within 5 minutes. In a poopie suit you could last five times as long.............stare at the bathroom door.

Then came beautiful yellow rotten ice....so if we bellied up and survived or jumped and didn't impale our selves on a tree, all I'd lose is a couple toes or the tip of my nose. A most beautiful sight, yella rotten ice. Fire truck brigade.

I wasn't really worried ...was a bit late. There was a bigger hole in the other side of the cowling. The power recovery turbine (PRT)...in it's not my field...I'll WOG to 18,000 RPM. The top radome looked like hit by machine gun fire....and the back tail was hit too. Had it spun off at a deeper angle....no wing, and that was a sobering look. If it had gone off earlier...no other motor...burning wing.

Took them three days to get us a new plane.....

305 had a new engine put on, and eventually flew back to California.....where upon landing another engine had a magnesium fire and chased the plane down the runway! I'm sure the ambulances and fire trucks stepped pedal to the metal, when they saw that happen.

Best in the fleet....before SAC left us in the -30 degree cold over night.

One War, One Story.

Well...there was the time I was fighting airsickness doing an in air autopilot repair, in our shop hadn't made it to our new base in Korea yet; a month after a pretty Navy Model watched the Migs break ground....and all the way out until they shot it down. I wasn't being paid for that, not having flight status.

We did not have an escort....only hoping our F-4s could break ground and Johnny on the Spot faster than Migs.

The Navy Model

Ours was an ugly gray.

A few more pictures of the sleek Super Constellation.

Antique First Class.

In Air.

Nose on....

IMO the prettiest plane until the Concord.

Edited July 11, 2018 by Bo Bo Olson

July 12, 2018

Some very interesting memories! It's good you didn't get afraid when the engine's turbine (PRT) blew up. Panic's the worst thing that can happen in situations like that. For those interested the PRT used the exhaust gases of the engine to get some extra motion to the propeller. My guess would be that the Strategic Air Command would regard its bombers absolutely necessary - the Connies not so much...

More on the definitive Connie engines here for everyone that wants to see how they look like: https://www.superconstellation.org/TechnicalInformation/motor/motor-en.html

Edit: The link wasn't working before but it works for me now.

I agree that the plane is really beautiful with its wavy shape. The nose was lowered in the design to keep the nose gear's strut from being too long and fragile and the tail was raised to keep the three rudders and the elevators out of the wake of the propellers. The forces of the wake would make them less effective and the airplane potentially unflyable.

I've got some screen shots from the simulator.

USAF EC-121R Batcat (Vietnam camo)

Instrument panel

USAF EC-121T

Navy WV-2 without the tip tanks

Navy EC-121. The WC-121N "hurricane hunter" looked like that too.

Navy EC-121M

Instrument panel of the above

All the above are Super Connies, the standard variant of the Connie

Passenger Super Connies below.

An early one (L-1049E upgraded with L-1049G features inside), no tip tanks and no weather radar.

The standard Super Connie (L-1049G)

The earlier L-749 had shorter range, but it was more economical to operate. The passenger windows are round on these planes. On the later models they were square as Bo Bo pointed out.

The Military Air Transport plane has a glass dome behind the cockpit. That was used by a navigator to get sun and star bearings using a sextant to figure out their position. Some passenger planes had that too.

Finally here's the ultimate propliner, the L-1649A Lockheed Starliner. They didn't last long because of the advent of the jets in the late '50s. It had a different wing which got a lot of fuel inside.

The Starliner records, a quote from Wikipedia:

"On September 29, 1957, a TWA L-1649A flew from Los Angeles to London in 18 hours and 32 minutes (about 5,420 miles (8,720 km) at 292 miles per hour (470 km/h)). The L-1649A holds the record for the longest-duration, non-stop passenger flight aboard a piston-powered airliner. On TWA's first London-to-San Francisco flight on October 1–2, 1957, the aircraft stayed aloft for 23 hours and 19 minutes (about 5,350 miles (8,610 km) at 229 miles per hour (369 km/h))"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation#Records

Edited July 13, 2018 by ardene

July 13, 2018

No repairman was allowed on the R model, with out the crew chief there, and everything was covered with canvas tarps, so it remained secret. The R model read the mail before it was opened.

The C model had no radomes ......I worked on the D, G and H models

By the EC-121 normal max time was 12 hours; normally a bit less, though I'd heard of one doing 13.

But those top and bottom radomes did cut aerodynamics. And crew and equipment was heavier than stripped for that fantastic flight time.

I'd never heard of that.

M&T are new to me....that Military Transport one is a C model, except ours had wing tanks.

1/4th those instruments are 'mine'. And a few of the instruments at the navigators station....not all of course that was Com-Nav's toys.

I'm pretty sure many of my planes had a navigator bubble; or some of them did. Had to navigate if the nav instruments went out. I learned the basics of navigation in Tec School, in the B52 tied more Nav into the autopilot than the EC-121.

The reason it stood so high off the ground, was the long props. That tall trike landing gear was necessary.

Edited July 13, 2018 by Bo Bo Olson

July 13, 2018

Thanks for your feedback Bo Bo! These are some wonderful facts to know.

The radomes' drag shows even in those models. It takes some effort to accelerate. I don't know what the differences of the T and M were. Maybe they just had new upgraded radio instruments inside.

These planes are lovingly designed and freely distributed to the flight simulation community by Manfred Jahn and team. They are in-depth simulations, too. The cockpits are all like the R cockpit with variations in panel colour. In real life the autopilot's usually on the middle column between the seats below the throttles. They have put it below the windscreen for ease of access.

It takes a lot of trial and error to trim a plane in the flight simulator because you have no force feedback of the air stream on the yoke.

About your comment that most systems pass through the autopilot - That's to be expected, Lockheed's had a tradition of making unusually highly automated planes. Most commercial customers don't really care about bells and whistles of the sort. Governments do if their military tells them they should.

Back to fountain pens: do you have any nail you love? That's a question for everybody who reads it. I learnt to use ink to write with nails, so I can testify to their endurance and reliability on almost any paper. I also happen to like the look of the smaller Parker nails.

July 13, 2018

I have a 14 K Lamy Persona that had been a no line variation OB , that Pendelton Brown turned into a real nice CI.

Black Titanium Oxide....Art Decco 'style'.....the new Imporium with a great 'springy' 2X nib was the second design of the designer...."The Persona was designed by Mario Bellini who is known for his architectural designs."

Mine is a 1990 model...later models have a small dot/bump on the clip to keep it from rolling off the table. Discontinued in 2014.

When I was taking a newspaper won tour of the Lamy Factory I was told by the then head engineer who led the tour, a new Persona was coming out the next year.....I waited, and the years went by....Last year they came out......a fantastic better than MB 'Springy' nib, good tine bend, but only 2 X tine spread. .................sigh cubed, if it did 3 X like a semi-flex...I'd gone for it.

PB's writing.... has a spring loaded clip one must push at the top to have it open enough to clamp it on your shirt pocket. The new Imporium has a normal clip.