I came across a photo of B-25N 44-30823 (N1042B) the other day that I found particularly interesting, and will probably only be interesting to the other small percentage of the population (about 0.000026%) that can be considered Tallmantz Aviation junkies. It was probably taken in summer or fall of 1962 on the Orange County Airport Tallmantz ramp and shows the B-25 in the brief period between when it was modified as a (nearly) unique camera platform and when it was painted in the distinctive Tallmantz paint scheme. The photo comes from the collection of B-25 author Wim Nijenhuis, he of the B-25 book B-25 Factory Times among others.

The short story about this B-25 was that it was used by the USAF up until 1958 when it suffered a gear-up landing. It was sold as salvage surplus in October 1958 and purchased by an air tanker outfit at Yakima, Washington. The plan was to convert it for use as an air tanker, but that never happened. Instead, it was purchased by Tallmantz Aviation on May 17, 1962, and converted to become its second B-25 camera ship, the first being the original Paul Mantz B-25H N1203 (43-4643). N1042B had a custom-built camera nose constructed by Potter Aircraft Services at Burbank. The main feature of the camera nose was its optically-clear glass wrap-around nose piece. Any variety of Hollywood cameras could be mounted in the nose for film work. Tallmantz needed two B-25s for filming as the pace of work was pretty high in those early years. The first use by Tallmantz of N1042B was evidently the Cinerama wide-wide screen film How The West Was Won filmed later in 1962. (Corrected…the other B-25, B-25H N1203, was used for the How The West Was Won filming in May 1962.)

Part of the conversion process for N1042B was to add the paint and markings, and shortly after the above photo was taken, it looked like this.

Part of the reason all this came together because I saw the photo just as I was re-working my dedicated page to B-25N N1042B in the Tallmantz section of the website. That updated page (with this new photo) can be found right here. Thanks to Wim Nijenhuis for the use of the photo.