Thanks Kathryn

Kathryn's CD and notes arrived in the mail today. Hopefully I'll get to see what there is at the weekend. Thanks again!

Joe Baugher's revised entry for 42-50535

I was browsing something else on the Web tonight and happened to look at Joe Baugher's utterly excellent website on USAAS-USAAC-USAAF-USAF Aircraft Serial Numbers--1908 to Present (http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/usafserials.html) and thought I'd have a look at the entry for a certain aircraft. Readers who haven't lost the will to live through all my rambling will remember I emailed Joe on August 3rd and was pleasantly surprised to get a reply the same day (within a few hours actually)

Yes! Page updated October 2006 (where have I been?!)

See the results at: http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/1942_3.html

That'll do nicely for my last Christmas present.

Happy Christmas to all.

That's Cambridge, England.

Research progress note, hold the pontificating. I had an email from Kathryn McKee which, apart from wishing me a Happy Christmas (BTW Happy Christmas to my loyal readership!) also said that she was sending me a disk with her notes from the Norman Kiefer book. Wonderful. I do appreciate what you've done. Lovely.

The Year in Review

So, almost a complete year of blogging my attempts to compose a history of a special B-24. I think I can safely say I know a lot more now than I did back in January. I think there's more information to be had out there. There are places I haven't been, people I haven't talked to, e-mails I haven't sent and also (I might add!) e-mails I haven't received. So it's not over by any means. The pace of my research might have slowed to a crawl but it hasn't stopped.

60 years ago - the plane had been sitting in a field in SW Missouri since August, and sitting in a field in Oklahoma for a year before that. Sometime in the next couple of months her condition would have deteriorated to the extent that the city fathers had her remains hauled off and scrapped.

"Thunderbird" lasted 10 years in Flandreau, SD and "Joplin Jalopy" lasted around 6 months, and maybe a little longer in the scrap/salvage yard. As recently (OK not recently) as the seventies, there were combat veteran B-17s in France and Switzerland which were scrapped because no-one was interested in buying or saving them. How things have turned around since then.! Someone hauled a B-17 out of a lake in Labrador a couple of years ago and they're going to rebuild it to flying condition! There are a couple of other B-17 projects across the USA and recently I saw some pictures of "Doc", the B-29 under restoration in Wichita, KS (yay!) which is making great strides. But for an accident of time there might have been a couple of B-24s ripe for preservation. Still, while there are idiots like me searching for grains of information, we canvat least remember that these machines were here.