Hello WIXers,
Not so much a maintenance report this time; rather, a trip report for the most part ...
Communicating with Long Tall Glen Thursday, I can tell you that there was maintenance performed on Hot Stuff, and additional test runs have the engines and props dialed in, but now the left generator is acting up again. Typical for the old girl, and a good day's work for the boys who were out there.
But PJ and I took advantage of my light-duty chit, and got us a 96, and had a swoop down to NAS Beach, and it was good.
That is early-to-mid-70's Marine Corps jargon for "as long as I'm all crutch-bound and unable to turn wrenches, PJ and I took off for four days and hopped a plane for Pensacola." And it was good.
Two and a half days in the museum seems like a good start, now that's we're back. It is a heck of a good museum, and now, having finally been to Pensacola, I see why it's such a desirable and popular duty station.
Along with looking at extremely excellent displays of airplanes and related things, we spent a day in the library/archives, searching out everything we could find on PV's, Fleet Air Wing Four, and the like. We got some good results.
But the pictures are all of airplanes, and other picturesque things like that. I'll share a few of them with you. We'll resume our regularly-scheduled Hot Stuff maintenance reports with the next post ...
Of course, we did not hesitate to talk the leg off anyone who pretended to be interested, regaling them with everything they ever could have wanted to know about Harpoons, Hot Stuff, the Aleutians campaign, and et cetera.
The people invariably wanted to know if we'd seen the Museum's Harpoon, and in fact we got ourselves out there to see here as soon as we could possibly do so. That's her, up above. She doesn't fly, and the nature of the tour didn't let us get out to get a good look, but she's got her proper antennas, and the mount for the cockpit radar display was visible through the windscreen, and the gun-camera blister is there. And we lust for those pylons and external tanks.
Interesting, and somewhat amusing, for us were the various placards accompanying the museum's several R-2800 display engines. The placards include mentions/pictures of the airplanes that used the engine. To their credit, the authors included PV-2's in that list. But a close look at the Harpoon picture (lower right corner) showed us: that's our plane!
Well, we enjoyed that a lot. Little pictures of Hot Stuff, all over the place! We did not mind pointing that out at all.
The sign out in front of the main entrance, advertising the flight-line tram-tour, included a picture of their Harpoon. PJ and I just enjoyed seeing PV's be paid any attention at all, and ate it up with a spoon.
We also ate up with a spoon the delicious root-beer floats to be had in the "Cubi [Point] Cafe," which contains memorabilia of about four decades of WESTPAC cruises from every conceivable squadron and detachment from every era between Korea to the present.
We did not see any representation of Fleet Air Wing Four, so we gave the barkeep a couple patches, which as you see she enshrined very nicely, tucked in between the bar mirror and a flight helmet.
The museum includes some incredibly ingenious displays, and certain planes that make one cry out in little yelps of history-geek ecstacy, such as the SBD in the "flight deck" display. The plane is a Midway veteran, raised from the bottom of Lake Michigan.
There are a lot of ingeniously packaged diorama-type displays, that give you a nice look and feel, up close and personal.
There's Guadalcanal, where they're doing their best with a tired and beat-up Cactus Air Force F4F:
There's a completely brilliant evocation of another F4F, shown still at the bottom of Lake Michigan, which is where the plane was previously located ...
There's a very nice cutaway Catalina fuselage, showing a well-appointed interior.
PJ, helpful as always, went over to annoy a couple fellows who were working on David McCampbell's Hellcat:
She reports that the fellow working in the wheel well needed a safety briefing but didn't get it, apparently. He had no hands! This probably explained why he didn't seem to be making much progress.
Anyhow, the National Museum of Naval Aviation is a top-flight museum. They're digging the foundation for an expansion, which clearly won't be big enough to get more than a few of their "outside" collection indoors, but they'll have to enclose an awful lot of floor space to get 'em all.
I bet could suggest a few candidates for this next hall, and an exhibit theme or two ...
That's it for this time. See you next time,
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