Aero Vintage Books

When wrapping up my Coastal Command Fortress book I learned that a former 206 Sqn navigator by the name of Joe Griffith lived just down the road. I made a couple of visits and Joe proved to be a goldmine of additional information on Fortress operations from RAF Benbecula. Among the details he obviou...

Thanks for the kind words, Scott and Steve. For anyone interested, I've been building an Additions and Amendments document that expands on topic areas in the book and provides corrections. Happy to send a copy to anyone who would like it. You can contact me via the email or PM links in my forum prof...

The RAF found its Coastal Command Fortresses, armed with only a single .3 or later .5 machine gun in the nose, proved to be highly vulnerable to return fire from surfaced U-boats after they were ordered by Adm Donitz to stay on the surface to fight it out (although the Fortress crew could use the up...

From colour images I have seen I would venture that the scheme is USN Dark Gull Grey over Insignia White.

Robert

For interest, the censored items are ASV Mk II antenna: homing receive antenna under the wings and the tripod support for the sideways-looking, wire-based antenna above the fuselage - the wires for this are just visible, as is the homing transmit antenna towards the bottom of the nose cone. The homi...

My slip. 'USAAC' should read 'USAAF' in my post of Dec 24, 2022.

Robert

That would be an honor, Scott. If you do pick up a copy, look out for ten additional appendices hosted online by the publisher - some appeared in the first edition, including the history of 41-9234 - and overall there there were too many to be accommodated in the second edition. The links appear at ...

The Boeing drawing and a reproduction of a Dupont paint chip card that includes Deep Sky are presented in the book.

Robert

Hello All: Robert Stitt chipping in on various points raised here. There is a Boeing drawing of the specified paint scheme for B-17Es to be delivered to the UK for the daytime high-altitude bombing role which, as Steve points out, never came to pass as the Fortress was ultimately considered unsuitab...

It’s believed the Fortress was damaged by a wind storm during the scrapping process - note the flattened fin root fairing and battered forward fuselage. Aircraft damage due to storms was a relatively common occurrence at Reykjavik.

Robert

Hi Dan: This is Coastal Command's first Fortress IIA (B-17E), FK184 'A', following service with 251 (Met) Squadron at Reykjavik where it was struck off in July 1945 and scrapped. You can just see the '4' of the serial to the immediate left of the rear entry door. It served very briefly with 206 Squa...

Dan, I came to the same conclusion re these two B-17Cs. A question though: How do we know the usually-quoted USAAC/RAF serial tie-ups were correctly recorded in the first place? Is it possible they were incorrectly recorded and this was only corrected when the 10th AF received them from the RAF and ...