Warbird Information Exchange

F6F-3 Fox 21 Ens, Hill VF-5 USS Yorktown Nov 1943

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Don't touch my junk!!

That is one COOL shot. I have seen it before and it always wows me. I have yet to catch a shot like that. Guess the atmospherics have to be just right. Right place, right time.

I've seen prop vortices a couple of times. It requires lots of ambient humidity and an airplane with enough power to generate serious prop tip vortices.

The view from inside the cockpit when the airplane is wrapped inside a vortex is pretty interesting.

Jack,
We'd sometimes get a prop halo or two on take-off from Porterville in the B-17 on cool morning with high humidity.It would usually happen just before rotation and would look like oil smoke intermittently puffing from around the cowl flaps of an engine.It got my attention more than once,especially before I figured out what was really happening.After that,it was sort of cool.I read somewhere that more than one single engine prop driven airplane crashed on take-off from a carrier due to the pilot's becoming disoriented from being inside a continuous prop halo in low light conditions where the exhaust flame caused reflections inside of the vortex.