Excellent PBY article and thank you for posting.

In 1988 I was working on a spray project on the Umatilla NF near the High Ridge Lookout tower. Another guy mentioned that he worked on that ranger district in the 1950s and remembered reading in the Lookout's log that a B17 had crashed on the slope below the lookout sometime during WW2. He said it was written in the Lookout's log that 5 or 6 of the crew had bailed out, then the plane flew in a descending circle and hit one of the parachutes before it hit the hillside. We did a little detective work and one day when it was too windy to spray one of the helicopter pilots and I hiked in and found it.

Just this morning I found this from the Oregonian dated March 25, 2010: "A B-17 crashed Aug. 16, 1943, south of Langdon Lake in the Blues, killing the pilot, 1st Lt. Lewis W. Hubbard, and three crewmen. The bomber was on a training flight from Pendleton."

"Don Goodrich was at High Ridge lookout tower when he witnessed the Aug. 16, 1943 crash of a B-17 bomber..."
http://www.eastoregonian.com/news/local ... 8c687.html

In 1972 we took one of our two week driving vacations down the east coast. Visited Kitty Hawk and Cape Kennedy:





Near Kitty Hawk, and me about 13

All the fun of going out to the carrier for your first carrier qual in the T-28, 1978. We were the last group of us to ever do it in a recip and a radial, on the USS Lexington to boot (smallest deck in the Navy). To make it even more fun we had to do deck runs, no cat for take-off, 1,420 HP helped a lot on an 8,000 lb aircraft. The aircraft where older than we where, they where new when my dad was an instructor. Talk about a leaky greasy monster. Something the lads in the other services will never be able to do, they always make fun of it, but they just can't do it, ever...

These photos were provided by my wife's grandparents. Pics were taken on a hike in northern Arizona when they witnessed a helicopter rescue of another hiker with a severe leg fracture. Early 1980's I believe.

Not exactly vintage, but it was taken with a disposable camera so it's vintage as far as I'm concerned My Dad took this picture of me with one of the two J-3s I learned to fly in back in 2002. Evergreen Field has been closed for a few years now and the hangar is no longer there. They used to have great Fly-ins there with hundreds of antique and classic aircraft attending.

That is so cool YB! Would have been so awesome to be an engineer back in those days.

I don't think anyone is going to top YB. Really, really neat. Thanks for sharing. Hope someday we go again, in our own spacecraft.

Very Cool Yellowbelly!

Great pics Yellow belly. I was infatuated with anything in the space program from the mercury program on up. I live in a rural town in indiana and just 30 miles from mitchell indiana where gus grissom grew up. They have a nice monument for him there.

everyone can stop posting pictures. Yellow Belly won my vote. (just kidding about stop posting though).

I very much enjoyed those pictures YB, thank you for posting them (and the story)!

Hey thanks guys. I've just Forrest Gump'd my way through the past several decades. I must be almost famous cuz here's Mike Melvill taking MY picture! That rocket motor is still hot from his X-Prize flight and that's Burt Rutan sitting on the tailgate. Backcountry Spacepilots. Another day when I just happened to be in the vicinity of something really cool.


and Kevin: I lived in Valparaiso before I went to Houston. I inherited Gus Grissom's Gemini suit for pressure suit qualifications.

Now I'm just thrilled to be in the same thread with Haile Selassie! Great stuff guys. Keep it up.

YB

Bring back the Saturn V!

Nice one YB, I can remember sitting in a dark hallway in country NSW with the nuns threatening to cane us if we didn't shut up and watch history unfold on a B/W blurry screen 50' from where I was seated, I was 8.
On a side note i noticed yet another geek punching above his weight, must have been ya glasses that caught her attention.

This picture is hanging in the office of the Hampton airfield...

The original owner of the Hampton airfield landed his Cub on top of Mt Washington in NH in 1947. I've been up there in the winter. It's a little brutal at times.

Yellowbelly wrote:Hey thanks guys. I've just Forrest Gump'd my way through the past several decades. I must be almost famous cuz here's Mike Melvill taking MY picture! That rocket motor is still hot from his X-Prize flight and that's Burt Rutan sitting on the tailgate. Backcountry Spacepilots. Another day when I just happened to be in the vicinity of something really cool.


and Kevin: I lived in Valparaiso before I went to Houston. I inherited Gus Grissom's Gemini suit for pressure suit qualifications.

Now I'm just thrilled to be in the same thread with Haile Selassie! Great stuff guys. Keep it up.

YB

Well YB you've delivered the tko with the Apollo photos. They were fantastic. , Then you hit us again with the x prize crew. Can you possibly get any cooler. Wait. How about an explanation of the jacket your wearing. Alinghi is a top sailing team winning America's cup trophies.
It goes way back but maybe you have some insight into that top secret keel wing that clinched the win for the Australians decades ago.

Sidewinder:

I'm such a fence sitter. Check my hat: Team New Zealand...

We have good friends living in Auckland and we visited them in 2002 just as the showdown between Alinghi and Team New Zealand took place. It was a disaster for the Kiwis. We also have good friends in Switzerland, so I supported both teams. The Swiss had a better wardrobe. I figured I would end up with a loser hat and a winner shirt or the other way around.

Looking at the photo, I should point out that Rutan and the boys had to go above 100,000 meters to win the prize. That's 328,000 ft (and some change). Notice the registration number on the spaceship?

YB