Little Boeing Meets Big Boeing

[Dan Jones]

Last week B-17G "Sentimental Journey" flew past my home field en-route from Edmonton and went on static display at Red Deer, Alberta for a couple of days. That evening, since it was a perfect night to go flying, my friend Don and I jumped in my Stearman and went down to see her up close and to see if we could get some pictures of the two airplanes together. Here's a couple of shots of the evening.







Afterwards from the comfort of my couch and with a cold beer in hand I picked up Scott Thompson's wonderful "Final Cut" and learned that "Sentimental Journey" was in storage at Pyote Field, Texas at the same time as my Stearman was! Small world...

(For the paint scheme police out there: No, it's not a real N2S-3, it's a PT-13D with a Continental pretending to be an N2S-3. But rest assured that when I recover the airplane in a few more years it'll be rejoining it's proper service - as a Continental powered PT-17!

Have a good week, guys - fly safe.

Dan

[StangStung]

Very cool.

[JohnB]

Great shot.

Here at Felts Field, we have two Stearmans which are just 24 c/ns apart.
What's the chance of that, two survivors that close (out of 8584 built..or 10,346 if you count spares) parked in adjacent hangars?

[k5083]

The odds are about 1 in 200 that two randomly selected items out of an ordered series of 10,000 will be within 24 places of each other.

In this case the odds probably are better than 1 in 200 because the survivors are most likely disproportionally drawn from some portions of the production run, owing to the differing uses and dispositions of batches of aircraft. Like with P-51s, for example, 15,000 were built but the survivors are clustered mostly in a smaller serial range near the end of the production that never went overseas.

Hey, you asked.

August

[Mudge]

The odds are about 1 in 200 that two randomly selected items out of an ordered series of 10,000 will be within 24 places of each other.

In this case the odds probably are better than 1 in 200 because the survivors are most likely disproportionally drawn from some portions of the production run, owing to the differing uses and dispositions of batches of aircraft. Like with P-51s, for example, 15,000 were built but the survivors are clustered mostly in a smaller serial range near the end of the production that never went overseas.

Hey, you asked.

August

Mudge the amused

[The Inspector]

And the airworthy B-17's are DOUGLAS or VEGA airframes and all CONUS late builds.

[JohnB]

In this case the odds probably are better than 1 in 200 because the survivors are most likely disproportionally drawn from some portions of the production run, owing to the differing uses and dispositions of batches of aircraft.
Hey, you asked.
August

I would agree with P-51s or B-17s...as "The Inspectror" points out (and can be seen by looking at the Table of Contents of Final Cut), late production, non-deployed B-17s make up a lot of the surviving B-17 population.

However, that would not be the case for Stearmans.
While they did not have to survive combat, they had to survive their training lives...and then many/most had to then survive lives as AG aircraft.
As example, in 1950 there were 4,125 Stearmans were on the civil register, but that dropped to 2,028 by 1959....and not all were exports.
Unlike combat aircraft that had to be sent to the front, I think we can assume that ther weren't many (if any) that were never delived to units and just "sat out" the war.