Friday, February 5, 2016

Amazing.

Uncrating and Field Assembly of the P-47 Thunderbolt Fighter - 1944

3 comments:

Chiu ChunLing said...

You just have to admire the sheer manly courage of flying directly into combat in an aircraft assembled in the field...especially when you contemplate the "simple" assembly process in detail.

Anonymous said...

Awesome ENGINEERING! Designing as complex a machine as that, to be able to be built with simple tools, and the crates and wood that it was all shipped in.
I'm a technician. I fix things. And because of that, I appreciate good engineering and design. I also deplore poor engineering and design.

Thank you, Mike, for showing this to us.

B Woodman
III-per

Bad Cyborg said...

+1000 on what Anon @ 9:38 AM wrote about the engineers who both designed the Jug and who devised the field assembly procedure! I had never thought about how they got the planes across the oceans. Details such as this are what really won the war for our side. As I watched the video I had visions of the innumerable/inevitable "Oh SHIT!" moments that must have occurred when somebody skipped a step somewhere. Wanna bet there was more'n one instance of them attaching the wings and then realizing they hadn't slipped the aileron control rod through the fuselage? And you just KNOW somebody forgot to lock the tail wheel a time or two. Reckon how much damage that caused when the tail wheel to roll of the lumber and the aft end of the fuselage impacted the ramp. Wish my father-in-law (crew chief/top gunner on a B-24) had had a chance to see this. He was a crew chief on several different types of aircraft during his 20 years. I bet he had some tales he could have told. sigh