But how did they do all this without a legion of MBAs inhabiting corporate offices in Maryland and Virginia?
Yes, that is correct.
On the left is a one-cylinder APU generator to supply power for engine starts in order to save the main batteries also there on the left.
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Looks like it has its own tiny fuel tank that had to be filled separately?
A B17 was parked at my local airport a few years back. They let us into the plane and spend a lot of time just gawking.
In 2008, I went to the Evergreen Air Museum for the first time. Oh, they called it the Evergreen Air and Space Museum then too, but after checking out the Spruce Goose and a couple of other things, we came across a B-17...
And that's where I met Lt. Col. Russell Barney, who had been a B-17 pilot in WWII and was volunteering at the museum. We talked to him for a little bit and then he pulled the ropes aside, opened up the plane, and he told us all about the plane and the war. I think it was the first thing I saw after lunch, and it was the last thing I saw that day - We asked questions and he answered them until the museum closed and they kicked us out. It was fascinating.
It's fascinating to explore the efforts made to train military aircrews during WWII. One operation in particular stands out, Great Britain's Empire Air Training Command. It established huge training bases in all of its dominions across the world, and also the United States. Because I'm a little lazy today, this link to Wikipedia explains it better than I could without jogging my memory and looking through books in my collection.
en.m.wikipedia.org
The US Army Air Forces built major airbase training centers across the Southern United States, taking advantage of the weather patterns that allowed flight seven days a week. The average amount of PIC time that culminated in the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers before the pilots began combat flying was around 400 hours.
The green aircrews' first challenge as they headed for the European theater was finding the tiny Narsarsuaq airfield, also known as Bluie West One, located on the southern tip of Greenland at the head of a fjord. Operational losses on these trips neared 10% during winter months; many pilots and crew disappeared before reaching England.
I saw a presentation given by a WWII B-17 copilot a number of years ago. He had *fifty* hours of total flight time when he was sent, along with the rest of his crew, to pick up a brand-new B-17 from the factory and fly it to Europe.
They found Bluie West One okay, but the weather east of there was terrible and wasn't expected to clear sufficiently to continue for several days, so they all went out and got wasted... And then at 3 AM they were roused and told to GO, NOW.
They were flying over the ocean at 10,000 feet and got into the weather, and started picking up ice. They didn't have enough training or knowledge to have any idea what to do, so they kept going in the ice until they were no longer able to maintain altitude, and they got down to where they were in ground (sea?) effect, at night, over the ocean. He said that the salt spray from the ocean helped them to shed the ice.
As if that wasn't bad enough, they got to England and everything was socked in. They were shooting NDB approaches. His crew got lucky, but the weather was hit or miss at all of the bases, and many of the other crews shot repeated approaches until they ran out of fuel and crashed. He said only 10% of the crews that left with them early that morning made it.