BWDenver

I was flying a 206BIII in the Arizona strip. Late April and the temps were hitting 95. So I decided to pull the front doors off. There is a warning in the Operators manual about the possibility of "control reversal". It was not a theoretical warning... Don't ask me how I know...

Not if you know what you're looking at. 😀 The TH-57 is a an off the shelf Bell 206 BIII, hence the enclosed TR drive shaft and enclosed TR gear box.. The OH-58A is a Mil adaptation of the 206A. Specifically, the rotor blades are slightly longer with scarfed tips. To accommodate the longer blades the tail boom is extended a couple of inches. You also should not fly with the doors off on a 206BIII, as above around 100 KTS you get control malfunctions. The paint scheme thought is remarkably similar, although the OH-58A was introduced in the 1968-time frame. One of the dead give

F4H-1 Redux.. I have not been able to locate any reasonably decent 3 views of the McD/Stanley seat. However, I do have blueprints for AMI's F4H-1 offering. While there are obvious differences, there are several constants. the first is the catapult support. It measures 51.57" tall. The internal gun "rail" supports measures 4.17" X 14.4". The seat at maximum width is 20 1/4". I know this is annoying to switch between decimal and fraction, but that's what's on the blueprint. The headbox is 14 3/8" and head pad area is 10" wide. The widest point on the McD/Stanley seat is

Testing time… The first US live inflight ejection took place over Wright-Patterson Field on March 15th 1986. The test airplane was a modified P-61-B-5 42-39498 Black Widow, named “JACK-IN-THE-BOX”. There were several ground tests as the P-61 with a jacked up nose ejected a seat into a net, then finally the in flight test on August 17th 1946 when 1st SGT lambert ejected from the aptly named JACK-IN-THE-BOX landing in a pasture north of Osborn OH. A few days later Cpl Brickheimer ejected from the P-61 at 5,800’ and 256 Kts on august 21st 1945. In some stories on rejection R&D

Should you ever decide to do an Army helo sheet, 68-16692 is one of the original 10 OH-58A airframes delivered to the Army for evaluation and test. It was used in Panama for hot WX testing. US Army Test board photo. It was later converted to an OH-58C. the red-orange high vis markings are bordered by black. Likely one of the more colorful OH-58's.

F-4D-29-MC 65-0772 “Pave Phantom” 25TFSq 8 TFW Ubon Feet-Dry. While some sources list the Pave Phantoms as 72 block 32 & 33 airframes, This is decidedly not either one of these. The AN/ARN-92 LORAN-D system (towel rack antenna) gave them very precise targeting capability to drop sensors along the Ho Chi Minh trail. This shot was likely shot in the late 60’s or very early 70’s by a Phantom backseat. This bird was delivered to AMARC as FP078 May 21, 1987 and scrapped Sep 10 1996. There were other shots with this one, but I made the mistake of lending the

When I was at Wright-Patt researching seats it was indeed a surprise to find the early seat. I'm still mulling over doing the XF-88B with the correct seat and turboprop. Just wish I had better info on how it looked besides the TO -1 illustrations... There is a void on information when it comes to the early sats, which is why I started researching them back in the 80's. Bryan

If you in the early build phase you might want to look at the thread I've been building on "Bang Seats". Others have also contributed. Attached are a couple of shots from the National Museum of Naval Aviation specifically on the F-4B.

F-101, early and late seats The F-101 has had two distinctly different seats installed in the series. Old school truss frame VS new school monocoque structure. The first appears to be one built by McDonnald. The second was built by Webber. While everyone is familiar with Martin-Baker, Webber is another story. In fact, they have built and developed seats in conjunction with the airframe companies for a good while. They were also a partner with the ACES II seat production in a Leader/Follower partnership with Douglas. The initial seat went into a few of t

Released in 1952, the XF-88 is a decidedly vintage kit. While the seat in the kit is grossly inaccurate for the XF-88, it's a pretty close approximation of the Webber B-47B Pilot and Co-Pilot seat. In the early 50's the Airforce was seeking a "Standard" seat. They settled on a Republic seat. It was fairly innovative, and had pop out drag paddles to keep it from tumbling. The seat was used in the B-47E, and that was about it. Webber bid on and got the contract for B-47 Seats. Lindberg used the Webber B-47 seat in all its kits. So, if you want to do a 1/4

ERA-3B, 144827 GD-101 VAQ-33 between 1983 and 1987, it was lost on Nov 1 1987 in a midair.

KC-130F 149808 "BOB" VMGR-252 NSA Glenview 2-12-1990 Bit more WX'ing on the backend of the bird than the front. Nice clean KC-130F with a little humor thrown in.

Bit of vintage paint. EA-6A 156981 VMAQ-2 USS Midway port call in Puson ROK, summer of 1978. As I understand it this was a non-typical monotone grey paint scheme. A group of us flew a UH-1H down from Taegu and landed at the Puson military compound. Then we took a taxi over to the port. I was flying with 377th Taegu DUSTOFF. As we were touring the ship we talked to some of the Helo folks. They flew us back to the beach in a SeaKing, or as they referred to it a "Seapig". Always had a spot in my heart to the Midway. One of the pilots was nice enough to g

Not a problem! Bryan

Hey Dutch, I greatly appreciate the offer! But I too have that kit. I'm looking to do DC-130A 56-0527 as it appeared in Bien Hoa, see below. When compared to other Intell DC-130's it's a bit of an odd duck in that the pylons it used were BQM-34 target pylons, with external supports. The BQM-34 pylon is a straight back unit lacking the extension near the lower end. that and it only has two inboard pylons, not the 4 of later birds. DC-130A 56-0527 differs from the follow-on DC-130A AQM-34 inboard pylons that had the extension as seen in the Airmodel kit.

PUCARA, Poo-Car-Ah, Pu-Ca-Rah Ok, I have no idea what the correct pronunciation is.... Mk.APO6A Rocket Likely one of the more unusual MB seats. US AC seats with rockets are designated as Mk.7’s. Non-US seats with rockets are Mk.6’s. I’ve seen several models of the Pucara, and I guess since it has a Martin-Baker seat people think it looks like a Mk.H7 out of a Phantom… Not so much… The dimensions were taken of a ½ scale blueprint Martin-Baker gave me. The PUCARA seat was derived

Very nice, I bet you don't move it that often!

Thank you for your encouragement. In reality it should have its own section for people to share derails like seats and cockpits for individual airplanes. Over the years I have found the one thing modelers don't have access to is what the bloody seat looks like or what color it is. This thread is going to get very long indeed just with my information. Cheers Bryan Wilburn

F8U-1/E1, -1P and up, AKA F-8A on… The first seat in the Vough Crusader was the dual mode Vought Low-Level ejection Seat. While the Air Force was using 2000 as recommended minimum altitudes with emergency altitudes of around 500’, Vought was using the minimum safe altitude of 50’ in level or climbing flight, from stall speed to over 500 kts. Considering this was late 1958 it offered a remarkable seat envelope. When the pilot unlocked the wing for landing and taking off the seat was switched to Low-Level mode. With the wings down and locked, the seat switched to High speed, High

The OzMods exhaust stacks are not actually a 100% straight through pipes. They do take a bit of a downturn, just not quite enough to be 100% accurate for the C-130A T56-A-11/9 engine. They are also fairly colorful in nature and not monotone in color. As you can see in the shots the exhaust of the C-130A T56-A-11/9 exhaust pipe is a multi-segment unit. the final unit larger than the first aft of the N2 nozzle and exhaust bullet. This little detail is likely an extremely difficult part to cast as it would likely lock the part into the silicone mold. Perhaps with using high press

So your crossing the Black Dog exhaust pipes with the OzMods aft nacelles? Nice idea! What's fascinating it the first C-130 took off on Aug 23 1954, and it's still in production in the form of the C-130J. And likely will be in production into the next decade.

The focus on this series of articles is not necessarily to create the definitive history of ejection seats. It's to give the modeler more information than he or she may have at their fingertips. I think the McD seat drawing I published may be some of the best to surface, IMHO, and an enterprising modeler, with the H7 seat dimension might be able to come up with a credible representation. Considering the mess the modeler gets into if they want to do an early F-4 with a Mk.H5 seat. One of the reasons for pointing out the McD/Stanley seat was to highlight the fact that

OzMods C-130A conversion, Italeri/Testers & Airfix C-130E/H. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to doing an early DC-130 is they were DC-130A’s. The challenge was the engines and aft nacelles on the bottom of the wing, let alone three bladed props. OzMods initial offering was only the props and what represented as tanks, but were really electronic pods. A number of years ago I ventured to the NSA (yeah, THAT Intel Agency) in Maryland to shoot reference shots of the C-130a on display at their aircraft display area. When we pulled in there was no one in sight. 45

Yeah well, I'm not the best typist... The figure of the first 10 airframes came from the folks at Stanley.

The discussions I had with Navy and USAF seat folks brought out a number of philosophical differences. The USN folks looked at the seat as a way to get the crewman out of a doomed cockpit in as little time as possible, hence through the canopy in a lot of cases. That, in and of itself, saved about ½ second. But lead to (mostly minor) injuries. USAF seat managers were opposed to that approach. Dick Atkins of Vought told me “The Air Force would rather kill a pilot than hurt him”. The USN use of a face curtain helped put the crewman in a better posture, so they didn’t slouch.