B-17 with "wiskers"

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Busty_Bomber
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B-17 with "wiskers"

Post by Busty_Bomber »

Seen a photo/drawing of a B17 with what appears to be wiskers. What are these?

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AslanB
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Re: B-17 with "wiskers"

Post by AslanB »

It is a catch device that was tested as a way to rescue downed airmen. If you notice, that is what is being done in the background of the image. It was also shown in at least one James Bond movie. They were in a life raft. Bond launced a small red balloon on a wire. In the movie, I believe is was a C-130 that was used but I could be wrong. Someting similar was used to catch the shroud lines of the parachutes of returning spy satellites in the Skyhook program.

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Paughco
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Re: B-17 with "wiskers"

Post by Paughco »

Cool picture! Here's a write-up in Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_su ... ery_system.

Here's the manual in pdf: http://downloads.slugsite.com/fulton-manual.pdf

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ratty
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Re: B-17 with "wiskers"

Post by ratty »

The movie was "Thunderball". I found this on IMDb:

"The Boeing B-17G-95-DL, 44-85531, registered N809Z, flown in this movie with the Fulton Skyhook recovery system (later used on U.S. Air Force HC-130 Hercules rescue service aircraft), was owned by Intermountain Aviation, a secretive company based at Marana Air Park, Arizona, which was revealed in the 1970s to have actually been a CIA proprietary company, wholly owned by the Agency and set up to cloak discreet operations, as reported by author and B-17 historian Scott A. Thompson. This aircraft is now known as "Shady Lady", registered N207EV, with the Evergreen Aviation Museum, Portland, Oregon, where Howard Hughes' HK-1 Hercules, a.k.a. the "Spruce Goose," is also displayed."
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AerialShorts
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Re: B-17 with "wiskers"

Post by AerialShorts »

Years ago I used to work on that airplane at Evergreen in Marana. The serial was 44-83785 but I couldn’t swear that was the original serial. The logbooks were incomplete and missing the time she operated with the Skyhook. She was Vega-built at the end of the war, served Japan coastal patrol duties, and then was used to develop the Fulton Skyhook. Intermountain got her, took the hook off which was accidentally later destroyed by running over it with a T-16 (IIRC) tank at some point. The plane itself started getting restored to WWII appearances with a ball, top turret, and tail turret which had all been removed. It served air show duties for the time I knew her and on one trip after changing out #3, the engineer/copilot removed the safety wire on the ball to get in during flight to check for any oil leaks under the plane. She was clean but nobody else on board was willing to go into the ball as long as it was open and available. No electrics but the hand cranks worked. With nobody else interested in going in, I got to ride it uninterrupted across the Grand Canyon. Cranking around and looking at all I could see from the ball. It was amazing. Tremendous luck and a ride I’ll never forget. Not sure her current status. She got moved to McMinnville, OR, to the Michael King Smith museum and I don’t know that she’s flown since. If I remember correctly she might have been closing in on main spar issues. I saw a news blurb that the museum is having financial difficulty and may be selling part of their collection.

There was a story about an attempted rescue of an arctic scientist using the Skyhook. The story went that he was sick but they couldn’t airlift him out normally (ice too thin / weather too bad to land) so the plane flew over their outpost and dropped the harness and balloon to retrieve him. The story went that he chickened out and the plane flew back to Alaska. He then supposedly relapsed and died. They moved him outside to keep him cold but he froze in a sitting position. The plane came back and he was Skyhooked out mostly successfully. Because he wasn’t frozen straight, he couldn’t be fully retrieved into the airplane and his legs hung out the very back end of the airplane (formerly the tail turret) and he was flown back to Alaska. That Skyhook image is probably a depiction of that “rescue”.

Somewhere I have a newspaper clipping that describes the whole thing but it may have all been an elaborate cover story. There was a recently declassified mission that she flew where the Russians had to abandon an arctic listening station because the ice was getting unstable. A couple of soldiers parachuted in to grab anything of value and then Skyhooked out with the booty, whatever the booty was. I don’t know but suspect the scientist story was a cover to explain the odd-looking airplane flying out of Alaska.

The plane in Thunderball is the Evergreen B-17 with the original Skyhook. The whiskers are wide to both make it easier to capture the cable but also to keep it out of the props. The cable gets channeled to the center of the V where it gets grabbed and the upper cable to the balloon severed away. The cable streams along the bottom of the fuselage and gets reeled in (not sure if the winch is at the nose or tail). At some point the person gets pulled in through the tail in a padded tube where the tail gunner position used to be. Bet it was a hell of a ride.
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