Part 2 - In Honor of Our OWN Helldiver at SOH .....

GT182

GT182

Charter Member
This is the last of the HELLDIVER photos.......

The last 2 are of me getting in the pilot's seat and sitting there wishing I could fly her. ;)
 
How did you get to sit up front?

Best I got to do was walk up on the wing. I don't remember the option of sitting in the pilot's seat. I hope they do it this summer if they bring it to Oshkosh.
 
Tom, it was 2.00 to walk the wing and 10.00 to sit in the cockpit. Picture was optional. I was lucky and got two photos.

Did you get to meet Col. Bud Anderson? I bought his book, and photo, plus got his autograph and a picture with him. That'll be in the next thread, with photos, for the WWII Weekend.
 
GT182 said:
Tom, it was 2.00 to walk the wing and 10.00 to sit in the cockpit. Picture was optional. I was lucky and got two photos.

Did you get to meet Col. Bud Anderson? I bought his book, and photo, plus got his autograph and a picture with him. That'll be in the next thread, with photos, for the WWII Weekend.
Click to expand...

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I wasn't there that weekend. Just saw the Helldiver at Oshkosh last year and maybe the year before.

Never met Bud Anderson. Have seen him there many times though.
 
It's nice to see one of them still flying. If I paid $10 bucks for everyone I sat in I guess I'd would owe a million bucks. How much would the charge be for starting one up"
It stll badly needs some TLC. The tailhook won't retract and from the guage the tail wheel strut needs servicing. Plus the tail wheel housing is missing. The SCR-522 radio and linear amplifier is also missing. That's just what I can see. God only knows what else is missing.
I think there are other SB2Cs. I can remember seeing a flyable one at Paul Mantz's museum in Newport Beach, CA. I never heard what ever happened to it when his wife sold it. It was a SB2C-5A in perfect condition. Shiny paint and all. She told me that all it needed was some hydraulic oil and away she'd go.
 
Helldiver, this one is based at Graham Municiple Airport, Graham, TX ... CAF West Texas Wing and the flyer says SB2C-5.

If you can contact them [http://wtwcaf.org/], maybe you could find out about the one from Paul Mantz's museum. If they know about it they could let you know. Or if they don't, maybe they could track it down somehow.
 
Helldiver, I told them you flew one during WWII. They said you could sit in any time you want.... for free. :d
 
Unless they want to fly it all the way from Texas to Plum Island Airport in Newburyport, Massachusetts, my days of sitting in one are long gone. However, it's nice that they would extend me the courtesy in sitting in one. Please thank them for me. - I'll be 81 years old tomorrow.
I will get to them and ask what happened to the SB2C-5A that was at Paul Mantz's museum. It was about a year after Paul died in filming. "The Flight of the Phoenix". She let me crawl all over it and it was just like it came out of A&R in Jax. It's hard to believe they would have let it go so far. I suspect that it ended up in some museum somewhere. It may be the one in Pensacola.
 
If it is Helldiver, then the CFA doesn't know about it. They told me only 3 exist.... and that wasn't one of them. They have no idea that another could be in still in the US and possibly flyable.
 
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