Quite coincidentally,I just finished watching the Russell Crowe film “Master and Commander,” which I’ve seen several times before over the years but wanted to show to one of my brothers who is a Patrick O’Brian fancier.

That film is probably filled with a thousand clangers regarding Napoleanic War naval conflicts. (“Oh, my god, those sheets don’t reeve through the blocks enough times, and did you notice how the wheels on the gun carriages are actually early nineteenth century? Can’t these movie morons get anything right?”) Yet many of us are happy to think it’s a wonderful film, which it is. Can’t we give air-warfare films about an era 70 years ago something like the same leeway?

I think a lot of people are forgetting that this Tuskegee Airmen film is “based on” or “inspired by” a true story. Nobody ever claimed it was a documentary. I could write an entire novel “based on” the fact that my grandparents emigrated to the U. S. from Alsace-Lorraine, but it wouldn’t be their biography.

Why is this abortion considered to be super-valuable? It’s the aerial equivalent of a four-door Ferrari.

This is well worth looking at for those interested in the race

Unfortunately, it’s misleadingly titled “The Story of the Great Transatlantic Air Race,” and it’s no such thing. It’s the story of one part of the GTAL.

Granted the Phantoms were the crowd-pleasers, but I wished many times during the race that I could have flown 1,100 mph between free aerial refuelings, as I sat grinding along between two 240-hp Continentals, feeding fuel through garden hoses and hardware-store spigots from two 55-gallon drums in the cabin…

IIRC, the job of firemen is to protect property.

in that regard, they failed their job.

SUE THEM!!! (not too much, enough to get the chief’s attention)
Set an example that firemen must be quick and versatile do their job, no matter what obstacles in their way!

Those of us who are pilots quickly get annoyed when “outsiders” reveal no understanding of our jobs. I’m sure firefighters feel the same way. I’m not a firefighter, but as an EMS volunteer I interfaced with them frequently.

Follow me through, here: The primary job of firefighters is to protect lives. Their secondary job is to prevent ancillary damage from an existing fire. Their tertiary job is to protect property. If no lives are at risk and the existing fire endangers nothing else, a firefighter’s job is NOT to risk his or her life saving the vintage Corvette in the garage of your burning house, or the cargo of toilet paper in a burning tractor-trailer, or a gasoline-filled airplane afire in the middle of a cornfield. It really doesn’t matter if the airplane is a classic warbird, that’s not the firefighter’s job to judge; to him or her, it’s an “old airplane” filled with fuel. Nobody signed on to protect it “no matter what obstacles in their way.”

I loathe couch potatoes who presume to tell me how to do my job as a pilot, and I’m sure firefighters feel the same way.

With the mechanical advantage/leverage of a prop blade, you can actually bend a conrod by hand if you try to push through a hydraulic lock on a smaller radial–say 220/450-hp class.

It is going to the U. S., as you probably know, as the owner (warbird collector Rod Lewis) lives in San Antonio. Last time I counted, he has 19 warbirds, some of them quite unusual–only flying Douglas A-20 Havoc, an original Tuskegee Airmen AT-6, the Bearcat racer Rare Bear, the P-38 Glacier Girl). His collection is private, unlike those of Kermit Weeks or Paul Allen, but he does fly many of his aircraft in air shows.

“Don’t let this ignorant minority get to you Nige…”

Jeez, to call Graham Simons part of an “ignorant minority” is really pushing it, from what I’ve seen of his postings and background.

And yes, I agree that this is not a “replica,” any more than a Pontiac Fiero with a Fiberglas Testarossa body is a “Ferrari replica.” Having said that, I think the Frenchmen achieved a praiseworthy result, and I can say that having myself built a wooden airplane, a Falco F.8L.

“I note enormous amounts of smoke firing up these old radials (not just on these Fws) – and if I’m hearing it right, a lot of misfiring until the engines settle down. Why is that?”

It’s not the classic “running rich,” it’s oil. Air-cooled engines of any sort, with some dissimilar metals and lots of different coefficents of expansion as they warm–whether it’s my old 911 racecar or a Pratt & Whitney–allow a fair amount of oil to seep into the combustion chambers after they shut down. Sometimes so much so that the bottom-most cylinder[s] on a radial will collect enough oil to create a hydraulic lock, if they’ve been standing long enough.

That’s the reason radials smoke a lot on startup, whether they’re old or brand-new: they’re purging themselves of lots of oil in the combustion chambers.