They Called His Plane Scrap Metal — Until It Dominated the Sky скачать в хорошем качестве

They Called His Plane Scrap Metal — Until It Dominated the Sky

The humid air hung thick over Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, on the morning of August 20th, 1942. Second Lieutenant Marcus James Holloway stood at the edge of the coral runway, watching mechanics work on what might generously be called an aircraft but what most people at the airfield simply called “the wreck.” It was a Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter, or at least it had been before it had accumulated enough battle damage, mechanical failures, and jury-rigged repairs to transform it into something that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts salvaged from a junkyard. The Wildcat bore Bureau Number 5193, though most pilots referred to it by less official names: “the jinx bird,” “the hangar queen,” or simply “that piece of shit.” It had been at Guadalcanal since the Marines first seized the airfield three weeks earlier, and in that time, it had been through five different pilots, four of whom were now dead and one of whom had refused to ever fly it again, claiming the aircraft was cursed. The Wildcat’s history was written in the patchwork of repairs covering its fuselage and wings. There were bullet holes that had been riveted over with aluminum patches. There were burn marks from an engine fire that had been extinguished just before the fuel tanks exploded. There was a replaced propeller that didn’t quite match the original specifications, causing a persistent vibration at certain engine speeds. The canopy was cracked in three places and had been repaired with plexiglass from a crashed Japanese bomber. The rudder had been replaced with one salvaged from a different Wildcat model and didn’t fit quite right, giving the aircraft a tendency to yaw left that required constant rudder pressure to correct. The right main landing gear had been damaged and repaired so many times that it sat at a slightly different height than the left, giving the aircraft a noticeable list when parked. And perhaps most concerning, the engine, a Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp radial, had been rebuilt multiple times using parts from various sources and now produced noticeably less power than it should, particularly above fifteen thousand feet altitude.