Hey Mr Galvin, did you acquire any extra jet stuff

[RonMiller]

www.ronpatrickstuff.com/

This looks pretty cool and right now may or may not be street legal. It sounds like they (the government) are looking into it being a possible weapon.

Anyway, we know you have some of the best airplane stories, do you have any of these different stories you wish to share with us?

[Galvin]

Some people have WAY too much time and money on their hands.

I've always said that some fool would put a Rolls Royce Merlin in a Miata if only some other fool would sell him the adapter kit.

[JimCasey]

Darn! They were out of Merlin kits that day so I had to use an Allison. Still a better fit than the P&W twin wasp, tho'

[jetmex]

I wanted to put a JT8D in the bed of my truck. Then we got rid of all the airplanes they were installed on and some so and so took the one I was hiding in the woods behind the hangar..... ;D

[Galvin]

Speaking of hiding parts in the woods...

I once had a friend, an older guy named Lyman Bannister, who used to do the maintenance on our flying club's airplanes back in the sixties and seventies.

Lyman had worked for Howard Hughes almost his entire adult life. Not Hughes aircraft per se but Howard Hughes himself. Lyman and several others were A&Ps (A&Es back then) and pilots that Hughes used as copilots when they weren't maintaining his airplanes. "Used" is the operative word too because according to Lyman, Hughes could be a drop forged and chrome plated prick when he felt like it and working for him could be trying.

Any of those in this select circle of pilot/mechanics had to be ready to fly with Howard at any time of the night or day the spirit moved him to commit aviation. Lyman says he had a long stretch of flying with Howard in his Convair 240 after midnight until about dawn where Howard would take the airplane off and land it but would direct Lyman to fly out over the Mojave desert and then fly a racetrack pattern while he (Howard) would pace up and down the aisle of his private airliner for several hours.

Lyman speculated that he had trouble sleeping and this was his way of counting sheep so he could get to sleep after they got back to Santa Monica and he went home.

I seem to remember that he also speculated that this inability to sleep was one of the residual effects of his crashing the prototype XF-11 back in 1947. (N.B.: One of my two best friends in high school, Jim West, now Dr. G.J. West and a prof at UC Davis, was a little kid growing up in West Hollywood at the time and actually saw the XF-11 go directly over his house going northwest that day, making a terrible racket due to one of its counter rotating props having gone into reverse pitch, and then watched it descend and crash into the expensive houses a few miles away up in the Wilshire area near the country club.)

Anyway Lyman Bannister and the other slaves did this kind of periodic weird flying duty until Howard quit flying altogether after some years and their duties morphed into just mechanic stuff. They eventually slipped into de facto night watchmen duties because there was simply nothing to do. All retired and none were ever laid off or let go. Hughes might have been hard to work with for some but he took care of his emplyees.

He also said that Howard never got rid of anything he had made or designed either and would ask about things that he had not touched for years and somebody had better by God come up with the item. For this reason no one dared throw anything away nor to forget where it might be found either lest Howard get a bug up his butt about it and demand to see it.

Lyman also turned me on to the fact back in the sixties that there was a single engined single seat airplane he thought might be a Vultee Vanguard being stored at the plant and which he would occasionally see. It turned out not to be a Vanguard but an earlier aircraft designed by the very same Richard Palmer who was also the Vanguard's designer a few years later. It was of course the famous Hughes H-1 or Hughes racer that Hughes donated to the Smithsonian a few years later.

SO, what does this have to do with the hiding of parts in the woods? Well, it is not well-known that a significant number of parts for the second HK (Hughes-Kaiser as in Henry J. Kaiser later of car fame) flying boat were being stored at the Culver City plant and that there were also many, many new R-4360 engines in cans lying around the back lot.

Hughes would not let the bulkheads and ribs and other parts for the second "Spruce Goose" (a name he disliked, BTW) be junked, he asked about them regularly, and the number of canned engines out back was due to the fact that every time a newer and improved dash number of the R-4360 came out, Hughes would insist on changing the engines in the completed "Spruce Goose" down in its dry dock in Long Beach and the practically zero-time engines that had been replaced off it would end up in the cans out back of the hangars in Culver City, eight at a clip.

The engines on the "Goose" were never run in the enclosed graving dock/hangar at Long Beach but, with their propellers more or less permanently removed until the airplane was finally moved out of the area years later, were hooked up to a set pulleys driven by electric motors that would be turned on periodically to run hot oil through all eight engines and prevent any rust from forming in them.

The week Hughes died all those replaced engines as well as the parts for the second "Spruce Goose" just mysteriously disappeared.

[ctdahle]

Was in McMinnville two weeks ago. The museum was closed, but you can see the goose through the big windows. I knew it was big. I didn't realize it was THAT big.