h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Phred

Hope you don't mind moving this conversation here. I'm pleased to talk, and I'll never find anyone with a better understanding of the practical aspects of this than you.

For starters, here's a much better aerial photo :
http://www.multimap.com/map/photo.cgi?client=public&X=433000&Y=385750&gride=&gridn=&scale=5000&coordsys=gb&db=pc&lang=&mapsize=big

Well done for finding Chantrey's collection of Sheffield photos. You know what the pavilion/cafe looks like. You're right, it's at the north edge of the green space, right under the trees. If you find the top of Onslow Road (which is on the south side of the park) using the streetmap frame, it's due north of there. You can see the cafe on the photo if you know where to look, only it doesn't look much like a building, just a pimple.

There's a scale-bar on the picture. The memorial stands due north of the cafe by perhaps 60 metres. The exact heading of the plane as it crashed is hard to ascertain from the photos, but it was certainly pointing downhill and can't have been more than 45 degrees at most off due south. The photo doesn't really show it, but the tree-covered area is a pretty steep bank, perhaps 50 ft from top to bottom. You get some idea from the Stars and Stripes memorial picture (if I remember) which is taken facing north up the ban

Harvey's book is ISBN 190158700-2 : Mi Amigo - the Story of Sheffield's Flying Fortress (1997, ALD Design & Print)
It's by a small independent publisher, but if you send me an address (you could use UG Yahoo), I'll post you one.

There are several more reasons I haven't yet said why I believe that the footballer's account is fanciful :

1. Kriegshauser's DFC citation describes manouevring to miss an "English home", not people. This is consistent with an approach from the north. Mi Amigo must have practically scraped rooftops in the Glade (see streetmap frame again).

2. The front page article in the local paper from the day after the crash makes no mention of the footballers, though it does cite numerous other witnesses.

3. You'll know this better than I, but I rather think that if a Flying Fortress was coming at you so that you could see crewmen waving, you would not stand your ground and wave back.

You're probably right about the approach from the east, glimpsing the field, and a turn through 270 degrees to attempt a landing from the north. The ground that Mi Amigo finally hit, though, is fifty feet above the ground that the footballers were on. I think they overflew still pretty high - too high in fact to attempt a landing in that small space on that pass.

The sad thing if this is right is that Kriegshauser's best chance would have been to carry straight on east and plough down the Porter Brook valley. He could also have veered to the south-west and into another long green strip called Trippet Wood. If he could have kept it up just two more miles due east he'd have been right out over open moorland.

To have come down in the space it did (missing houses in the Glade but still stopping short of the cafe), Mi Amigo must either have come down steeply or been very forcibly arrested. The latter is inconsistent with accounts of an intact fuselage with wings still on before the fire. But we know the tail was torn away, and was lodged among trees at the top of the bank.

I wonder if it's possible that the tail hit the trees and the drag was sufficient to take most of the forward momentum out of the rest of the aircraft.

OK so far? What do you think?

(this is your Space, of course, but perhaps we should invite GD over here too?)

Pin

OK. For 'straight on east' read 'straight on west', and for 'latter' read 'former'.

I've had a hard day...

I used to drill and due PT every day in the summer of 1963 in Texas right next to a moth-balled B-17 on a parade ground. The windows are VERY small. To see someone waving you would have to be in danger of being chopped to bits by the propellers. You make a very convincing argument. It would be very hard to wave in a visible way from a shot-up B-17.

Nice link by the way...I saved it as a favorite place...you wouldn't believe how much time I wasted trying to get a better arial photo...Thanks...

I wonder if they didn't bail out because they had badly wounded on board?

That's another thing I've wondered about - how much the pilot would know about the condition of the crew behind him. I don't know, for example, how much movement was possible inside a B-17, and whether there was continuous access from cockpit back through the fuselage. Could the men in the turrets withdraw inside the aircraft, or did they get in through the canopy and have to stay there? (If it was like that, there'd be no way that the ball-turret gunner could suvive a crash-landing)

And could the pilot have known (even with complete cloud cover) whether the aircraft was over land or sea?

I think there may very well have been seriously injured on board. Or possibly men who were unresponsive to calling because they were dead, but Kriegshauser couldn't be sure that they were dead.

Before the baling-out question comes an earlier one. Why didn't Kriegshauser crash-land sooner? He would have known that the east coast is relatively flat, treeless and unpopulated compared with further inland.

The suggestion in the Entry, that he was gambling on the cloud breaking, could be right. Also, he may not have been sufficiently sure that they were over land at all. Finally, coming down far from population would be no use if he had seriously-injured crew.

And perhaps they were already too low to jump by the time they realised they were close to the ground? I guess you'll know these things better than anyone. I'm just rather assuming that going 100 miles off course means that a lot of instrumentation wasn't working properly.

The last flight of Mi Amigo is certainly full of mystery. Maybe it's unfair to speculate. The deaths of brave men make it harsh to postulate that there might have been survivors if the pilot had made different choices.

Back in the present, there's one 'Citysnapper' even more prolific than Chantrey in photographing Sheffield. Here are diary-weeks from Dave Milner's archive, each featuring Endcliffe Park :
http://citysnapper.org/dm/sheff2001/05/20010511.html
http://citysnapper.org/dm/sheff2004/08/20040806.html

The pilot and copilot had physical access to the entire aircraft. They may have been to busy to take advantage of this even if they were both uninjured and assuming that the intercom was knocked out. One would assume, however, that at least one of the other crew members could have delivered a report to Kreighaser. The turret gunners could withdraw into the aircraft if the electrics supporting the ball trrets were operating.
http://www.b17.org/flight/interior/
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/4762/warbirds/b17-4.htm



That's a hard question. If the navigator was uninjured, even the most incompetent navigator would know by "dead-reckoning" that the coast of England had passed below an hour or two before Sheffield. If the navigator was incapacitated, it is doubtful that Kreighauser would have been confident of that while still in the clouds. Training for young WWII aviators was very thin.



I think Kreighauser would have been aware of the situation in the back if even one of the other eight crewmembers or the co-pilot was not incapacitated. He would have recieved at least a verbal report on the situation.



Your explanation of cloud cover is reasonable. I also saw a source that the bad weather that day included snow.



Makes sense.



You would assume the altimeter at least was working. It's A self-contained device that almost certainly would have been available to Kreighauser thoughout the flight. However, the reasons you list for flying very low (injured crew, lack of power) may have prevented a bailout...I'm not sure what kind of altitude was required back then. 500 feet?



Kreighauser doesn't care what we think. However, the average aviator likes to dissect these things and imagine how they would have done better and survived.

Sobering stuff. Thanks for the pictures. I hadn't visualised it like that - a strange mixture of tomb-like and homely. The ball turret underneath seems a terrifying place.

I went back to Harvey and read more diligently. There are more relevant facts. There were sightings (and 'hearings') of the incoming bomber in districts of Sheffield more or less in a line from ESE. There were reports of rooftops in Endcliffe sprayed with oil in the last moments. Harvey himself seems to favour a view that the plane didn't effect a controlled belly-flop at all - instead it may have experienced a massive engine failure while trying to climb, and then fell in a stall.

If the attempt to turn and climb really did finish her, then it's a pity they saw the park. They seem to have been on a perfect line for an open moorland crash-landing at the edge of the city, only about 2 miles further on. There were fire tenders chasing the plane, alerted by people further east. There was even a hospital close to their 'ideal' crash site.

Snow : there's a light covering on the ground in the photos. They show burned-out wreckage in daylight, though, and there is no dark pool round it - so I guess it probably snowed overnight after the crash.

Harvey also cites a newspaper feature from the 1960s as a principal source. I think I need to spend another Saturday morning in the Local Studies Library.

So Krieghauser is possibly doing a tight go-around, in a steep bank, with a possible lack of power, approaching a very small landing area so he has to try to keep the approach speed low, with a yaw from one or more inoperative engines and possible icing conditions.....scary stuff. A prescription for a stall.

As you say, a source of endless speculation.

I observed a C-47 "Gooney Bird" with a engine out "crab" in for a landing at the San Juan, Purto Rico airport just last year. Talk about time travel. They were consided ancient when I was a tad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_(flight)

I don't know why that link doesn't work....the article titles is stall_(flight) which you can get to by clicking the link and then chhosing the option "search for other wikiapedia articles". It's the first thing that comes up...

Hi Phred
Just thought you might like to know that an hour ago I spoke on the phone with the cousin of Sgt Charles Tuttle, ball-turret gunner of Mi Amigo.
Next weekend I'll pass copies of David Harvey's book to his daughter, who's visiting the UK. Mr Tuttle hopes to come himself, for next year's memorial service.
h2g2 is a wonderful place.
Pin

That IS interesting. Glad all my uncles and father got home ok. Too bad about all those that didn't.

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?"

Hey, Phred. I've got lots to tell you now, if you're still interested.
Let me know, yeah?
Then, if it's worth your time, I'll find some of mine.

Pin

Yeah..I am...Just passed the Black Hills National Cemetery. It's Memorial day, full of visitors.

I've spoken to many different people about Mi Amigo in recent days, and learned a lot.
The most telling thing, and something I'd never really thought of before, is that some of the accounts are considered to be complete fabrications. I've been trying to make everything I've read fit, assuming that even the extrapolated versions of events have a basis in truth. (Quite why anyone would claim to have been an eye-witness to something when they weren't is beyond me)
If you take all the reports, and weight them according to how soon after the crash they were made and the degree of corraboration by independent accounts, it seems you get an altered scenario.
1. Mi Amigo was first seen over the city at least an hour before it crashed. The pattern of observations confirm that it was circling in the intervening time.
2. None of the contemporary reports suggest an attempt to land at all. Onlookers don't seem to have realised the plane was in distress till it crashed.
3. It may well have been overtaken by a sudden and catastrophic engine failure. It fell out of the sky, probably rolling right over in its descent.
4. It hit the ground at the top of the hill only yards from the Glade, probably somewhat tail first. The fuselage then slid something like fifty yards down the bank.
There seems to be an acceptance that we'll never know why the pilot delayed an attempted landing, or why he hung about over a city.

This might be of interest...130 missions

http://www.edp24.co.uk/Content/Features/USAAF/asp/Witchcraft.asp

Interesting, but if you're speculating that Mi Amigo stayed up because there were still bombs on board, it doesn't add up. First, the bombs would have gone off on impact or in the subsequent fire, or at least they'd have been recovered from the site later. Second, the crew would hardly circle over an allied city while trying to detach bombs.

Confession : I’m unsubscribing from this thread whenever I post to it, so that it doesn’t show up in my PS. I’m worried that my speculation might cause distress to the Tuttle family if they’re lurking, and at the same time I’d like to have a better idea of what really happened.

I’ve got a theory that might explain the accepted facts. If Mi Amigo was circling, we have to surmise that Lt Kriegshauser had a pressing reason for staying aloft, when all the evidence suggests he should have been trying to crash-land at the first opportunity.

The first reason for staying up would be having nowhere to land, but in that case (like the bomb theory) it makes little sense to fly in circles above a city. The pilot would have flown on in a straight line to clear the built-up area, surely. I suppose it’s possible that the heat from the city created the only break in cloud for miles around, but I asked a local pilot about that and he said he’d never seen such a thing happen (it’s usually the other way round, with Sheffield clouded and surrounding countryside clear). There is in any case another more likely explanation : maybe Kriegshauser already knew where he planned to land.

In that case, it wouldn’t have been in a tiny space like Endcliffe Park (the crash on the edge of the Park therefore being no more than coincidence). I already mentioned open moorland only 2 miles west of the crash site, remember? Perhaps Kriegshauser had found it and judged (wrongly) that there was no immediate need to put down out there.

Now we need a reason for not crash-landing immediately. The most convincing one I can think of as is that it would kill a trapped crewman who they were trying to free - and that man would probably be the ball-turret gunner (hence my circumspection about thread visibility).

The other thing I’m wondering about is what might cause an aircraft to suddenly crash, when it’s pilot was prepared to take the risk of keeping it aloft. Most probably an engine failure, I guess. Maybe you’ll have an idea of how a B-17 flying with three engines would fare if this suddenly became two, but I’m supposing that losing the second engine on the same wing would be catastrophic. The aircraft is said to have rolled, remember. In fact two independent accounts say it rolled three times.

They got so close to surviving it all, it seems. Circling seems to imply that most of the crew were more or less OK, or at least that those who were dead were very certainly dead. It also suggests that Kriegshauser judged that a clear majority of his surviving men were safe from immediate danger. It’s distressing to think that after those terrifying hours, their hopes might have been rising just before the end.

One thing that much of this contradicts, though, is Kriegshauser’s DFC citation, which reads in part : “…Lt Kriegshauser attempted to locate a field in which to land. Engines became inoperative over a heavily built-up area and he was forced to crash land. An English home was directly in the path of the bomber, but Lt Kriegshauser, exhibiting an exemplary devotion to duty, manoeuvred the crippled aircraft over the dwelling. It crashed approximately 100 yards away…”. Were the USAAF given to wishful speculation, do you think, or would this statement be sure fact? The ‘home’ could certainly have been the one(s) at the southern end of the Glade, which were credibly reported to have been missed by a few feet, and which were undoubtedly showered with oil. Nonetheless, the literal truth of the citation would require the plane to be under at least partial control. That seems to go against the credited eye-witness accounts.

One last idea is almost certainly wild speculation : is it possible that the reason for the sudden plunge was that Mi Amigo was shot down by an over-zealous ground-crew who mistook it for a German plane? It might have been too late in the war for anti-aircraft batteries to still be maintained, but I’m inclined to do some checking on whether there were any in the vicinity. This explanation would at least provide a reason for the paucity of information from the authorities.