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Was P-38L-5-LO s/n 44-53236 (now displayed at the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, WI) the last Lightning in the USAF inventory? Constructed at Lockheed, Burbank for Project Del-3235 its history (taken from its Individual Aircraft Record Card) is as follows:
Accepted 17Jul45
Available 18Jul45
Delivered 19Jul45
Ferried Burbank – Memphis 22Jul45
Ferried Memphis – Dover 23Jul45
Assigned to 4146th AAF Base Unit, Dover AAF
Assigned to 4000th AAF Base Unit, Patterson AAF 18Sep46
Assigned to 4104th AAF Base Unit, Rome AAF 17Oct46
Assigned to Buffalo AMC 22Oct46
Assigned to 4000th AAF Base Unit, Wright AAF 15Jan47
Assigned to Eglin Proving Ground Command (611th AAF Base Unit) 28Jan47
By this time it had gained the buzz number “PA-236”, and is likely the only P-38 to be marked in this way.
Capt Donald S Lopez was assigned to Air Proving Ground Command at Eglin AAF during this period and recalled the aircraft in his book “Fighter Pilot’s Heaven” (Smithsonian Books, 1995),
“During these months, March to October 1947, I enjoyed a stretch of some of the best and most interesting flying of my career. Despite being assigned to the climatic hangar for the first half of the period, I was able to fly with the fighter test squadron almost as much as I had before the transfer. I became the test officer on the A-1 gunsight in the P-38L.”
“The A-1 gunsight in the P-38 was the first radar-ranging, computing gunsight used by the Army Air Forces. The test version of the sight was called the Davis-Draper sight, after its inventors Col. (later Lt. Gen.) Leigh Davis and Dr. Stark Draper of MIT. The sight was developed in the MIT laboratories and was mounted in a P-38 because of the space available in the nose section of the pilot nacelle and the clear field of view for the radar resulting from the space between the propellers. It had been installed in one P-38 in early 1945, and by 1947 that P-38 was the only one remaining in active service in the AAF. The sight could not have been installed in any of the single-engine propeller fighters without some kind of a high-drag pod on the wing outside the arc of the propeller.”
“Flying the only P-38 in the Air Force prompted some interesting reactions from former P-38 drivers. Colonel Slocumb, the squadron commander, flew P-38s during the war and, like all P-38 pilots, loved the airplane and its distinctive sound, a throaty purr due to the turbosuperchargers. He told me to taxi by his office at the corner of the hangar on every flight and rev up the engines so he could enjoy the sound, which of course I did. Whenever I flew it up to Bedford, Massachusetts, to enable the MIT technicians to modify the sight, the airplane would be surrounded at each refueling stop by former P-38 pilots and mechanics lovingly renewing their acquaintance with it. It was lucky that the airplane was made of aluminum or it would have rusted away from the tears shed on it.”
“The tests went on for a number of years, as the MIT lab was constantly modifying the sight based on the test results. The sight was regularly maintained and modified by an MIT technician or technicians at Eglin, but the airplane had to be flown to Bedford whenever major modifications were to be made. There the gunsight would be removed and taken to Cambridge. All of the gun camera film shot during the test flights was analyzed frame by frame at MIT, and the targets were scored and hits charted by the MIT crew at Eglin.”
“The targets were flag targets, 6 by 30 feet, with radar corner reflectors. They were towed by the squadron's B-26 (later by Douglas A-26s), flown by the medium and light test squadron, at 200 mph at 8,000 to 10,000 feet a few miles offshore along the Gulf ranges. All firing passes were made toward the Gulf, but camera gunnery passes could be made in either direction. The 20mm cannon and two of the .50-caliber machine guns had been removed from the nose to make room for the radar and sight. The two remaining .50s were fitted with hydraulic chargers, and the ammunition belts had dummy rounds after each ten live rounds, so only ten rounds could be fired per gun during a single pass. This precluded expending too many rounds on a single good pass and made the test more precise.”
“The P-38 was a good gun platform, and as my proficiency increased, I achieved some excellent results that were gratifying to the MIT team and to me. On some of the best passes my average tracking error was only half a mil (one mil is the angle subtended by a chord of 1 foot at a range of 1,000 feet). Since I was firing from 750 yards (2,250 feet), my pipper was within 1.125 feet of the target center throughout the tracking portion of the pass. On these passes 25 to 27 percent of the rounds fired were hits. A score of 30 percent was required to be rated an expert aerial gunner, but that was based on firing from a much shorter distance and lower angle off. The gunnery specialists at the Wright Field armament lab told me that with a six-by-thirty target mounted on a ground range, a .50-caliber machine gun firing from 750 yards would score only about 27 percent because of the muzzle waver while firing. In other words, the Davis-Draper sight was very effective in the hands of an experienced pilot.”
“The sight was designed to be a gun-bomb-rocket sight. We did not participate in the rocket-firing tests, but we did considerable dive-bombing with the P-38; later, with the P-84, we tested all three modes. The divebombing procedure was quite simple. The pilot climbed to 10,000 feet, set the sight to the bomb mode, held down the cage button, and rolled into a dive of about 70 degrees. When established in a steady dive with the pipper on the pyramid target (a four-sided wooden pyramid, about 20 feet on a side and about 10 feet high, painted to contrast with the ground), the pilot released the cage button, and the pipper was held on the target. This caused the plane to fly at slightly less than one g as the dive angle slowly increased. When the accelerometer-actuated computing mechanism in the sight calculated that the time was right, the bomb was released automatically, and a light on the sight signaled the pilot to pull out.”
Then, the following year,
“The Eglin-based crew from MIT's instrumentation laboratory completed some modifications to the Davis-Draper (later A-1) radar-ranging gunsight in the P-38 in early April [1948], allowing me to take up where I had left off in its testing. Some of my flight test school training proved valuable in the sight calibration runs that had to be completed before the firing and bombing phases could begin. I had to make numerous runs at precise airspeeds and altitudes, holding the sight on a fixed point and filming through the sight for as long as sixty seconds per run. The film was developed and analyzed back at MIT, and we were given the go-ahead for the firing and bombing phases.”
“The air-to-air firing phase was brief, since we only had to confirm what had been previously accomplished. The modifications to the sight were primarily in the bombing mode. The sight's special features, radar ranging and automatic lead computation, were not used for air-to-ground gunnery, eliminating the need for firing at ground targets. I spent a good deal of time for the next several months diving toward the ground from various altitudes and at various angles. Again, precise airspeed and altitude at the entry to the dive were of prime importance in guaranteeing that any inaccuracy could be attributed to the sight and not to poor technique. The sight, however, proved to be remarkably effective. Using it, I was able to achieve many direct hits and an overall low CEP (circular error probable). In a dramatic firepower demonstration, the sight allowed me to score a direct hit on a pyramid target after releasing the bomb and completing my pullout above a thin overcast. Although the observers in the bleachers could hear the P-38 in the dive, they couldn't see it through the cloud layer, but I, obviously, could see the target well enough to hold the pipper on it.”
The aircraft was classified ‘obsolete’ and redesignated as a ZF-38L on 01Jul48. Its final assignments were thus:
Assigned to 3200th Proof Test Gp, Eglin AFB 09Jul48
Assigned to 4000th AF Base Unit, Wright-Patterson AFB 23Aug48
To Class 26 Wisconsin 02Dec48
Lost from 2750th ABGp Wright-Patterson AFB 07Dec48
44-53236 was ferried from Wright-Patterson to Duluth, Minnesota on 07Dec48 “…in heavy weather”, the flight made by Don Lopez. It was then stored in the care of the Minnesota ANG.
It was then trucked to Poplar, Wisconsin on 06Jul49 (it had initially been planned to transport the aircraft across frozen Lake Superior) in preparation for it becoming a Richard Bong memorial. The rest is more commonly known. Images attached show it at Duluth and Poplar.
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