Hi Denys and Wirt :)
   Ok... now wait a holdit (just what exactly is a Holdit anyways? hehe)

    Even, I being the young'un that I am (Yes, Connie I claim every year I make
it Thru!!!) have ridden in a DC-3, B-17 (without any weapon systems installed
but otherwise in WWII configuration) and a Ford Tri-Motor...  'course most of my
'blade time' has been spent in C-130, C-141, Hueys (UH-1H) and BlackHawks...

    'Course as Denys learned during lunch in Houston last month... I can
basically only identify if the aircraft is Friend or Foe... and type of
armaments being carried.... hehe

Art "Quite impressed with all of you's knowledge bases! " Bahrs

----- Original Message -----
From: "Denys Beauchemin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 10:09 AM
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Fun Quiz


> Wirt writes:
>
> And I suspect that I'm old enough and had an odd enough reason to be the
> only
> person on this list that ever travelled on a Constellation. I would not
> certainly describe the Constellation as "graceful," but my trip to Thule,
> Greenland on one of them was one of the most memorable trips I've ever had.
>
>
> And you would be wrong.  Whilst the Constellation were quickly replaced by
> jetliners with the major airlines, especially on the major routes, the
> Connies, DC-3, DC-4, DC-6s and a whole host of other piston and turboprops
> carried on service with smaller airlines and on routes where the airports
> would have short runways or even no concrete runways.  I have flown in DC-3s
> and Connies in Canada in the 60s and 70s.  I flew in a DC-3 as late as 1974
> just south of Hudson Bay.  The runway was dirt.
>
> The Super Constellation was indeed graceful, it its day.  It was designed in
> the late 1930s and first flew during WWII.
>
> The Connie was known as the best Tri-motor or three-engine airplane as a
> testament to the initial unreliability of the Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines.
>
>
> Denys
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 11:07 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: OT: Fun Quiz
>
> Denys writes:
>
> > Just a correction here.
> >
> >  Item 42:
> >  The Super Constellation was never jet propelled.  The version of the
> >  Lockheed airliner to which Christian is referring is the L-1049 A through
> H.
> >  The H version (the last of the 1049 AKA Super Constellation) had 4 Wright
> >  Cyclone R-3350-988TC18EA-2 Turbo-Compound Engines.  The R-3350 is a
> twin-row
> >  supercharged, air-cooled radial piston engines with 18 cylinders and a
> >  displacement of 3,350 cubic inches.  This model was rated @ 3,400 HP.
> These
> >  engines were a later version of the Wright R-3350 Turbo Compound radial
> >  engine used in the Boeing B-29 of Hiroshima fame, and were also used in
> the
> >  Douglas AD-1 Skyraider and the Lockheed Neptune.
> >
> >  The Connie and Super Connie were beautiful, graceful aircrafts, which had
> a
> >  short lifespan in airline service.  The definitive version of the this
> >  aircraft, the L-1649 Starliner was built in 1955, just a few years before
> >  the introduction of the De Havilland Comet, Boeing 707 jetliner and the
> >  Douglas DC-8.  These jetliners spelled the early doom of the beautiful
> >  Connie.
>
> And I suspect that I'm old enough and had an odd enough reason to be the
> only
> person on this list that ever travelled on a Constellation. I would not
> certainly describe the Constellation as "graceful," but my trip to Thule,
> Greenland on one of them was one of the most memorable trips I've ever had.
>
> In August of 1966, I was assigned to our satellite tracking station in
> Thule,
> Greenland. As was normal, the day after classes let out at the university, I
> caught a standard commercial jet ride to Philadelphia, where I took a
> military bus to McGuire AFB, New Jersey. Our standard departure points were
> either Travis AFB, California (if you were going west) or McGuire (if you
> were going east). As student scientific aides, we had to get to our
> destinations and be settled in as quickly as possible in order for the
> people
> we were replacing could leave and get back to the university before classes
> resumed for the next semester. It was a spectacular way to earn your way
> through school, door-to-door satellite tracking.
>
> I spent one night in an Air Force visiting officers' quarters and boarded a
> contractor-run (Arrow Air, if I remember correctly) Constellation the next
> morning. We flew to Boston and arrived there about noon in order to pick up
> a
> bunch of physicists from MIT. These guys were looking for magnetic monopoles
> trapped in glacier ice, as physically close to the magnetic north pole as
> they could get: Thule AFB.
>
> We took off a little after 2 PM from Boston and flew north for the remainder
> of day, arriving at Goose Bay, Labrador at about 10 PM, where we ate and
> refueled. The Constellation was not a comfortable aircraft. It was noisy and
> it vibrated like hell. It seemed impossible to mechanically synchronize four
> engines so this "wa-WAH-wa-wa-WAH-WAH-wa-WAH" constantly vibrated through
> the
> aircraft, rattling your teeth and making sleeping impossible.
>
> We left Goose Bay just after midnight, in pitch darkness and then flew due
> north. Just an hour out of Goose Bay, the sun rose again, dead astern. That
> surprised me so much that I had to think about it for a few minutes, in a
> "what-the-heck-is-going" mode of thinking. But it didn't take very long for
> it to dawn on me that we had just crossed the Arctic Circle and we were now
> in the land of 24 hours of sunlight.
>
> As the sun became higher and higher in the sky, we flew straight up Baffin
> Bay, low and slow, only a few thousand feet off of the surface, at 180 miles
> per hour, but that made for the most spectacular scenery you could ever
> imagine. The shadow of the aircraft would and ripple and flicker across the
> giant icebergs, some of them easily 20 or 30 miles long, as we flew over
> them. The ground below was the brightest blue arctic water you could imagine
> interspersed with the whitest ice imaginable.
>
> If we had to go down, the icebergs --no matter how rugged -- were considered
> our only hope. Survival time in the water was less than 2 minutes. We
> arrived
> in Thule about noon the next day and were told that we were the first flight
> in quite a while that had made it to Thule with all four engines running.
>
> Wirt Atmar
>
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