Dave, Reg Sabu he was working in a elephant stable in mysore when ‘discovered’ by a hollywood director in Mysore in the early 30s – and he went to US. He got his US Citizenship in 1944 or so.

He was a Ball gunner in a B24 with 370 Bomber squadron, 13th AF

I once had contacte by email with his pilot Richard Paul who has written about his experiences
http://5thbomberbarons.com/html/richardpaul.html

a photo of the crew is here which also shows Sabu. http://5thbomberbarons.com/assets/images/307thBGPaulCrewretouchedsm.jpg

No obvious relics in sight as during a visit in Oct 2002. But heard about a ‘dump’ area where (later) wrecks are kept – never got to see it.

Sofa So good

The CFTs dogive a mean look to the ’16s

ok…for people who missed seeing the original picture i had posted above of the same MiG-27 flying over the sea 😀 kindly check out the shadows .

The trees and the house in the background, the shadow is to the left and the shadow of the MiG-27s vertical fin falls to the right . 😮

Hope that settles the dispute.

An RIAF Log book

Perhaps to provide some variety here, I am posting three scans from the logbook of an Indian Pilot who flew in SEAC

The Logbook had a khaki type cover – with just his name and rank F/O written in the top right corner.

Page 1 has his name and rank as P/O

And one of the ops pages shows him undertaking conversion at 151 OTU risalpur. Thankfully Indian pilots had the practice of recording serial numbers directly instead of sqn codes (Even though there were sqn codes in the initial days). This makes the job of tracking down the numbers esier.

All the other pages, endoresements, assesments are similar to that of the RAF ones posted above by dave and others.

Bollywood mil aviation movies – check Vijeta and Hindustan Ki Kasam. Sangam has some good believable shots too.

Border has some good shots but the movie sucks. As does Agnipanth (Suryakirans take off in one shot in formation….on a mission to bomb pakistan:D) yeah its that bad.

Sorry for the late arrival

Sorry to arrive late on this thread, but the scanning and emailing took time. I tried to send to the concerned parties, but some came back bounced.

Dieno, the twin fin fighter is a HF73? It looks different in the diagrams given by HAL to Vayu. (Check mail, you would hve got the complete article by now).

I am attaching the 3 view diagrams that appeared in the article here.

-Jagan

Remember – There is no ‘direct entry’ Navigator stream in the IAF. All Navigators started off as potential pilots – they just couldn’t make the grade or go solo during basic or advanced flight training before commissioning. Then they are sent to the Navigation stream.

So all navigators, whethr transport or combat, have some kind of basic flight training in them. When it comes to the crunch, if the guy in the front seat gets knocked out , the GIB will know enough to fly the aircraft back. But whether he knows enough to engage in aircombat, or even to land , I would n’t really be able to tell.