Um, a mega-sized homebuilt scale B-17 Bomber

[mrclark303]

This weeks winner.

Seconded!

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[CINDERS]

LMAO Sentry nice one

[garrettbragg12]

This is the coolest project I've seen in awhile. Anxiously waiting flight videos to be posted, as it just got approved to be airworthy yesterday according to the Facebook page! Thanks for sharing!

[Flying10uk]

This thread has reminded me of a story concerning a badly damaged B17 that my father told me years ago. As far as I can remember of what my father told me is that he remembered a B17 coming back from a raid that was seriously damaged from anti aircraft fire. The pilot struggled to get the aircraft home and only just made it back to "friendly soil" but had to put the aircraft down in a farmer's field right on the Essex coast most probably near Clacton on Sea. What is perhaps surprising about this story is that the U.S. Army sent out a team of riggers/engineers to spend about the next 2 weeks repairing and making good the damage before finally flying the B17 out of the field, presumably to it's home base.

Would this be a common/normal practice to go to so much effort to repair such a badly damaged aircraft when a simpler solution would be to just scrap it where it was? I believe that there may have also been some sort of work to produce a makeshift single use runway out of the field in order to fly the B17 out safely.

[Bob Womack]

You know, it would entirely come down to the condition of the airframe. If the airframe was basically intact they might very well be willing to sink a the work into getting the rest of the bits working well enough to fly her home. There is so much to consider with a plane this large and complicated. If this was one of those "wing and a prayer" situations where they progressively lost all their engines except one from flak and fighter damage, they could unbolt and replace the engines literally in hours. But behind that are the fuel lines and control cables and prop controls. And then there are the flight control systems and fuel tank and brakes. They would probably be willing to ferry a B-17 with three engines if the control systems fuel tanks, and brakes were intact but replacing punctured fuel tanks could take a long time. So...

And then you think of a short while later in '45 when B-17s were rolling off the end of the production line and going directly to the scrappers yard. B-17 Liberty Belle was saved from the scrapper in '45 by a smelter owner who figured someone would want a complete, unused B-17 and ponied up $2000. He turned around and sold the plane for double that to Pratt & Whitney. Though she was saved from the fire in '45, here's an odd co-incidence: she burned to the ground in a corn field in 2011 due to a fuel leak. That hurt. All involved were safe.



Bob

[browningautorifle]

Though she was saved from the fire in '45, she burned to the ground in a corn field in 2011 due to a fuel leak.

Rats...

[CINDERS]

An interesting tale of a couple of B-17's in WWII....https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&r...7-9bKdmL6ybSmg

[browningautorifle]

An interesting tale

That was quite a flight...