Slowing Down
Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:11 pm
The following story was related to me by P.D. Straw Major General U.S.A.F. retired before he died in an airplane crash several years ago. While P.D. was a B-17 co-pilot that was shot down on his 20th birthday and spent 14 months in a German POW camp this story is about a post war experience.
In P.D. words from a living history tape I made.
" When I was a boy up in North Texas an old farmer had bought an old WWI Jenny at an auction and was teaching himself to fly. I would sit under the hackberry tree near the pasture and watch him take off and get up, then land, then back up, al little higher, then land and so on. What I most noticed was that as he started to land he would cut the engine off and then back on, then back off untill he would get the wheels down. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that was how you slowed the airplane down, by killing the engine, then starting it again.
I never knew that he was wrong until I went to flight school and learned about throttles and flaps.
After the war I reached my dream and that was to change from being a bomber pilot to becoming a fighter pilot. I loved the P-51 and flew it every chance I got. My bird had to be put into maintance for a couple of days and I was stuck doing paper work. About noon the line chief told me that my ship was fixed and did I want to take it out on a test run. He needed some parts from Bergstrum in Austin so I climbed into the powerful Mustang and roared into the sky for the short hop from Brooks Field to Bergstrum. I got clearance from the tower and started my approach. That is when I realized that my airplane would not throttle down. Apparantly the carburator linkage had stuck or come loose and I was at almost Max power. I remember the old farmer of my youth and started my approach, flaps extended and kept cutting the magnetos off and on untill I slowed down enough to land. Once the mains touched the runway, I cut power completely and rolled to a stop. I sat there in the cockpit for a long minute and said a silent prayer thanking God for that old man so many years before. "
In P.D. words from a living history tape I made.
" When I was a boy up in North Texas an old farmer had bought an old WWI Jenny at an auction and was teaching himself to fly. I would sit under the hackberry tree near the pasture and watch him take off and get up, then land, then back up, al little higher, then land and so on. What I most noticed was that as he started to land he would cut the engine off and then back on, then back off untill he would get the wheels down. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that was how you slowed the airplane down, by killing the engine, then starting it again.
I never knew that he was wrong until I went to flight school and learned about throttles and flaps.
After the war I reached my dream and that was to change from being a bomber pilot to becoming a fighter pilot. I loved the P-51 and flew it every chance I got. My bird had to be put into maintance for a couple of days and I was stuck doing paper work. About noon the line chief told me that my ship was fixed and did I want to take it out on a test run. He needed some parts from Bergstrum in Austin so I climbed into the powerful Mustang and roared into the sky for the short hop from Brooks Field to Bergstrum. I got clearance from the tower and started my approach. That is when I realized that my airplane would not throttle down. Apparantly the carburator linkage had stuck or come loose and I was at almost Max power. I remember the old farmer of my youth and started my approach, flaps extended and kept cutting the magnetos off and on untill I slowed down enough to land. Once the mains touched the runway, I cut power completely and rolled to a stop. I sat there in the cockpit for a long minute and said a silent prayer thanking God for that old man so many years before. "