Life-saving Jugs: When the Republic P-47D Thunderbolt went to sea
Just when you thought the mighty Jug couldn't be any more amazing, you discover the eight-gun bruiser had a side-gig saving lives. A roaring surplus of horsepower got them to the scene pretty damn quick too, which was of vital importance for those requiring its services. Thrown around by a gloomy North Sea, most likely with hypothermia and injuries, bomber crews wouldn't last long. Lacking the well organised British rescue system the USAAF set up their own. The USAAF allotted older war weary 'razorback's (earlier variants that lacked the bubble canopy) to an improvised unit called the 5th Emergency Rescue Squadron based at Boxted Airfield near Colchester. Whenever a bomber mission was launched, two P-47 Thunderbolts of the Air Sea Rescue.
Their war weary mounts had the usual pylon loads replaced with smoke floats and flares, but kept their .50 calibre heavy machine-guns just in case they were needed. A canister with an air-drop capable raft was attached to the centreline rack. Some rescue Thunderbolts are recognisable thanks to a rare sliding 'bubble' canopy with reduced framing to improve the pilot's view. The unit saved 938 lives. Somebody buy this fighter a beer. Right now.
That was an extract from the Top 15 search & rescue aircraft an article Stephen Caulfield has written for hushkit.net which will be out this week
Here’s what’s new in Hushkonia:
Work continues on The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes. Here’s a teaser of our artwork of the Article 468, a rather exciting Soviet rocket fighter.
The very talented Matt Willis described the aircraft for Hush-Kit:
No-one but the Soviet Union could name things as well without naming them. Just take the satellite planned to be the first manmade device in space that was given the mundane and yet somehow awesome moniker ‘Object D’. Another example of this minimalist naming policy was a rocket-powered interceptor developed by the research institution OKB-2 in the late 1940s, ‘izdeliya (article) 468’. The 468 was somewhat ambitious for the late 1940s, an era when the major military nations expected fleets of supersonic bombers penetrating their airspace at high altitude would be the main threat in the immediate future. The Soviet Union had been working on rocket-powered research aircraft since the early 1930s, and work on a rocket interceptor, the B1, began in earnest in 1940. In many ways, the 468 was the culmination of this effort – a slender dart with surprisingly small delta wings and a surprisingly huge tail fin, aided by large fins under the wings that also housed the landing skids.
It is not known if stolen Soviet plans aided the design of Roger Ramjet’s aircraft.
The Soviet space programme proved there was nothing wrong with its rocket technology. In truly Dan Dare fashion, the 468 would take off using a rocket-powered dolly, before using its multi-chamber, four-nozzle liquid rocket motor to climb 72,000 feet in two and a half minutes, guided to its target at up to Mach 2 by radar in the nose. The design was expected to be impressively stable in flight but would have been interesting to land, given that its wing loading was more than double that of standard contemporary fighters. It’s a shame that none of the many pure-rocket interceptors of the late 40s and early 50s made it into the air, especially the 468, which made aircraft appearing 20 years later look a bit staid. All that remains of the 468, following its cancellation in 1951, is a wind-tunnel model at the museum of technology at Dubna.
What else?
We’ve just completed a Rafale versus Typhoon two part special for our YouTube channel edited by Iain from Planes TV. I’ll be sharing this soon (not very happy with the quality of the audio I recorded on this but you live and you learn).
I’ve interviewed a F-117 pilot, more on that soon - and universe willing I will be interviewing a former SR-71 pilot soon. Very pleased on both counts. Big thanks to the indomitable (and very lovely) Paul Crickmore for facilitating the latter.
Oh yes, finally sorted out some great merchandise, I particularly like the Mirage 4000 badge. As usual with these things I seem to my own main customer at the moment which I think shows I don’t understand capitalism. Let me know what you think of the merch, there’s a CF-105 Arrow design coming soon.
I hope you’re all staying positive in these weird times, fantasies of drinking a cider at an Old Warden air show keep me going!
Yours in love & aeroplanes,
Joe Coles
