Posted on 07/02/2019 11:49:15 PM PDT by robowombat
C64 Norseman. Essentially a Canadian bush plane. Think of a piper cub on steroids.
CC
Author has Goering and Goebbe mixed up.
Abducted by space aliens.
The author should have mentioned Judge Crater when mentioning famous unsolved disappearances.
So he trusts the government’s explanation. Got it.
From what he describes, wouldn’t the flight have been certain doom? And wouldn’t the Brits, at least, know if it was too cold to fly over an ocean?
I’m not sure the crazy stories are true but I’m not entirely sure this one is either.
What froze, the carb throat or a fuel line? The author doesn’t seem to know the difference. Last I heard warmer spring-like air temps are more conducive to carbs freezing than are cold winter temps. So was it a fuel line or what?
Ah, right at the beginning, it was the fuel lines...
Never fly in bad weather. Period.
PING
I had a music teacher in junior high who had played in Glenn Miller’s orchestra. Miller not only was talented, he gathered talented people around him. That music teacher was the best I ever had.
There would have to have been water in the fuel lines for them to freeze.
Said it twice in the article actually. Physically possible, but highly unlikely in my view. Would require that the pilot did not “sump” the fuel sustem during his pre-flight, that water in the fuel system was not frozen upon take-off and then froze while in the lines during flight.
More probably carb icing or wing icing.
In 1944, after the Allies recaptured Paris from the Germans, Eisenhower asked Miller to head up a joint British-American radio production team, to perform for troops and to record for broadcast back home. Miller was agitated by complications in Paris and when weather grounded normal transport flights, he hitched a ride on a small C64 Norseman with his friend Lt. Col. Norman Baessell and a 20-year-old pilot.
“He was mad, he was in a rush. He was a type-A personality with the intestinal fortitude of a general,” Spragg says. “He was a leading celebrity in America and he got his own way.”
Contrary to popular myth, the flight was not unauthorized, and conditions were not foggy, as depicted in the film “The Glenn Miller Story.” It was a “casual” flight in a plane whose model had been recalled due to defective carburetor heaters, but it was at the end of the triage line behind combat planes and bombers. Heavy clouds aloft had the pilot flying on “visual flight rules” relatively close to the water and the temperature was below freezing.
“The guy flew right into freezing conditions,” says Spragg, who strongly believes fuel-line freezing, engine overheating and circumstances doomed the plane.
Was the plane found by fishermen?
Carburetor icing can occur WELL above freezing, due to high velocity venturi air. It causes about a 70° F temperature difference! High humidity and it’s a factor, especially between 40° and 70°.
He’s likely dead now, one way or the other.
There are the Birthers and now we have a new wackadoodle group, the Bordellos, who believe that Miller was grabbed in a Bordello, murdered, and his naked body dumped. That’s a much better story than a rational conclusion from an investigation report that finds a mechanical problem causing a crash.
They do need to publish the investigation report.
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