Regarding the B-29 in England, did YB-29 #41-36393 land at Duxford while it was visiting the UK in 1944? I know it made several stops at various RAF airfields but I can’t remember if Dux was included and I’m away from my file cabinet. Thanks.

Regarding surviving early airframes I’ve seen “Balls 3” at Pima Air Museum in Tucson and “Balls 5” at Wings Air Museum in Denver. I think those two aircraft along with “Balls 8” did all the X-15 launches, although I can’t remember for sure if 8 was ever configured to launch the X-15 or if #3 and #5 did it all between them. I know “Balls 3” still has the X-15 launch pylon mounted on the starboard wing inboard of engines 5 & 6, can’t remember if “Balls 5” still does though. So maybe “Balls 3” is the oldest surviving B-52 airframe. Boeing scrapped both the XB and YB prototypes didn’t they?

Don’t think that will help him either. The Zenos Me-262 stuff is just pilot’s notes made from testing captured aircraft and is really just simplified operating instructions, speeds, distances, etc. It’s a quick-start guide and not much else.

Wow! Thanks for the post, what an incredible archive. I’ve never seen any of those photos before. It will take a while to process all the great details captured in those shots.

benhongh,

Right now it looks okay to me, all the pages seem to be there. If you are still only seeing 2 pages for that thread, go to the first page and you will see this URL:

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?t=107986

The second page URL is:

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?t=107986&page=2

So if you just paste “&page=2” on to the URL and hit “RETURN” you’ll be at page 2 of the thread. From then on you can just change the last number in the URL from 2 to 3, to 4, etc.,and then hit “RETURN” to get to the next page in the thread. If you have another computer at your location, see if the problem is still there on that machine. At least the thread is still there and can be accessed, but I hope everybody else can see the whole thread.

Thanks for posting this latest update. I had been following this story very closely but after studying the CVR/FDR data for a couple of weeks I had given up until more info like your post is made public. The transcript sure seems to reinforce what many of us had feared but just didn’t want to believe, that this crew with a great deal of experience between them were completely disoriented and didn’t seem to follow Airbus or Air France’s established procedures for loss of reliable air data.

I believe this is a Polish Fitter and the picture has been altered. Take a look at a picture of a Fitter with the landing gear down and you will see the remnants of the landing gear support struts in the shadows under the wings. Those couldn’t be there unless the gear were down. There are many other artifacts that show up in Photoshop where parts were erased and cloned to make the aircraft appear to be gear up. Also take note of the amount and shape of the heat distortion behind the aircraft, this is an aircraft that is taxiing and not an aircraft at takeoff or flight power levels. Also take note of how little runway is behind the Fitter, it couldn’t have gotten to this configuration in so short a distance so this would have to be a flyby low pass and that appears unlikely. Taking off on a taxiway is unlikely as well. All evidence I can see says this is an altered image of a Polish Fitter taxiing. I’ll bet the original image is floating around out there somewhere.

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